In Brief:
- A Republican running for governor of New Jersey is describing overdevelopment of the suburbs as a crisis.
- He says he’d undo a state law requiring cities to contribute a share of the state’s housing needs.
- A group of towns has challenged the law in court, without success so far.
Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey, talks a lot about the state’s high cost of living. He talks about housing, too, but not often in the same sentence. New Jersey’s problem isn’t that it’s building too little housing, Ciattarelli says: It’s that it’s building too much. One ad posted to Ciattarelli’s Instagram account shows bulldozers cutting down trees behind ominous music and a short clip of his opponent, Democratic Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, saying “we’ve got to build more houses” on repeat.
“There’s an overdevelopment crisis in this state,” Ciattarelli said in his opening statement at the first gubernatorial debate last month. “We’re taking the ‘garden’ right out of the Garden State with all this overdevelopment.”
This is an unusual theme at a time when officials in both major parties and in virtually every state in the country are talking about the skyrocketing cost of housing, and typically blaming a shortage of supply for causing it. A recent study from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies found median home prices are a record five times higher than median household income. Republicans from Montana to New Hampshire to Florida have led efforts to promote more housing construction in recent years. Ciattarelli himself has even said there is a “shortage” of affordable housing.
But in New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the country, he is betting that opposition to suburban development is a winning campaign issue. He’s taken aim at a state law, passed last year, which codifies a 50-year-old court case requiring every New Jersey municipality to contribute its “fair share” of affordable housing by zoning for new construction. “Jack opposes the current model,” he says on his campaign website, “because it is gobbling up open space, chasing wildlife from its habitat, increasing pollution from more idling cars on already congested roads, leading to more local flooding from stormwater management issues, and driving up property taxes due to endless legal fees and additional local services.”
The Ciattarelli campaign didn’t respond to questions from Governing by deadline.
By calling out “overdevelopment,” Ciattarelli is hoping to tap into a vein of frustration among municipal leaders trying to comply with the law, as well as ambient anxiety in many cities and towns about the loss of wooded areas. A group of towns clustered in the wealthy northern suburbs have filed a series of lawsuits trying to overturn the affordable-housing law. They say the law is overwhelming public services and forcing them to change the character of their communities.
“We can’t have high-density housing in the suburbs. Then we have no more suburbs,” says Mike Ghassali, the mayor of Montvale, N.J., and a lead plaintiff in the lawsuits. Ghassali, a Republican, says he supports affordable housing, but towns like his can’t keep up with the legal requirements to build more housing overall because they’re out of developable space. They’ve had to hire more police and build new water towers and other infrastructure to serve new developments. “We are for affordable, and against high-density,” Ghassali says.
A suit in state court has been dismissed but a federal lawsuit is still pending.
Given the degree to which the state’s housing laws are rooted in legal precedent, the Sherrill campaign has said it’s unlikely Ciattarelli would be able to overturn them if elected. In a statement to Governing, Sherrill said her housing plan includes expanding assistance for first-time homebuyers, promoting housing development on vacant lots, and “cracking down” on predatory lenders and negligent landlords.
“We must lower the cost of housing while protecting our open spaces,” Sherrill said. “I’ve had a long track record of balancing these priorities, including by bringing home federal funding to preserve the Drew Forest, and I’ll bring that same commitment to lowering costs and protecting our environment as governor.”
Part of Ciattarelli’s arguments against the law are based in environmental preservation. Advocates have called this a cynical cover for a position that’s really about protecting the exclusivity of wealthy suburbs, especially given Ciattarelli’s other environmental positions, like opposition to wind energy and support for fossil fuels. Ciattarelli is “scapegoating” affordable housing without a real concern for the environment, says Ben Dziobek, founder of Climate Revolution Action Network, a Gen Z advocacy group based in New Jersey. Still, Dziobek says, suburban sprawl is a real problem.
“We have dilapidated and disused areas in our urban cores that would be much better served if we developed them in the right way instead of losing what land New Jersey has left,” he says.
One of the key planks of the Mount Laurel Doctrine, the legal precedent underpinning the 2024 housing law, is that affordable housing should be built everywhere. That way people with low incomes can choose where to live, rather than being forced into one of a handful of cities. Similar dynamics govern housing law in places like California and Massachusetts, which also require cities to plan for a certain share of the states’ housing needs.
The majority of New Jersey cities have adopted “strong” plans to meet their affordable housing requirements under the law, according to the Fair Share Housing Center, an advocacy group that files lawsuits against noncompliant communities. Many communities are trying to meet their goals by promoting redevelopment of existing projects, including shopping centers and office parks, rather than zoning green space for development.
“We are doing this because it is the right thing to do,” says Jaclyn Veasy, the mayor of Evesham, where a new affordable-housing complex for people with special needs is being developed on a former office park.
But Veasy, a Democrat and Sherrill supporter who also serves as first vice president of the New Jersey Conference of Mayors, says the law is causing lots of consternation in other communities, many of which have little undeveloped land. “From a campaign standpoint, if I’m looking at it from the other side, it is a good talking point,” Veasy says. “Because always with a campaign you want to try to get to people’s feelings, and if they feel their communities are being changed in a negative way then they might latch onto it.”
