How Not to Develop New Jersey -

Courtesy New York Times (April 15, 2008)

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Anyone who drives around New Jersey should realize that the last thing the state needs is a return to the unregulated home-building boom that left it marred by scattershot housing and clogged highways. The Garden State is likely to get even more of this sort of misguided development, however, if the recently released draft recommendations of a housing task force are adopted. Gov. Jon Corzine must prevent that from happening.

With little public notice, the state’s new commissioner of community affairs, Joseph Doria Jr., set up the task force and loaded it with builders and their supporters, along with a few advocates of affordable housing. The result: a blueprint for rolling back environmental protections and allowing greater traffic congestion.

The task force recommended, among other things, permitting sewer lines to be laid in environmentally fragile areas and making it easier for builders to construct access roads from their developments that empty directly into main roads, slowing traffic. The recommendations would also make it easier to build homes close to rivers and streams and even in flood hazard areas.

The proposals closely match the building lobby’s wish list. Although Mr. Doria larded the task force with developers, he did not include a single representative from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection or other groups likely to resist the developers.

Mr. Doria argues that the recommendations would spur construction of affordable housing, of which New Jersey clearly needs more. But the state’s developers have a record of promising to create affordable housing as a pretext for building several times as many units of luxury housing. The recommendations look like a formula for locating affordable housing in remote areas rather than closer to jobs and public transportation.

New Jersey clearly needs to plan for future development. But it needs a blueprint that carefully balances market-rate construction, affordable housing and environmental protection. Mr. Doria’s task force was so unbalanced, and produced such skewed recommendations, that it is necessary to go back to the drawing board.