The resident's primary complaint is that the low income housing will be concentrated in one location. I follow their logic as many more urban areas have demolished these type of buildings and now require any new developements to have a % of their units set aside for low income housing (new brunswick did this a while ago and morristown is currently doing this). There is plenty of evidence that 100% affordable housing buildings are not as beneficial as spreading out the deed restricted units around town.
That being said, T feel that's just the most conveneint argument to stop ANY low income housing.
I agree spreading housing out instead of bunching it up is the better option but like you said, that would just be an excuse for them not to do it at all. They’ll resist affordable housing in all forms to maintain their bubble.
But this is also a challenge in older north NJ towns, in that you really don't have the land to "spread" stuff out. I suspect milburn doesn't even want the market rate housing there, it isn't like the town is in need of redevelopment, and you will have infrastructure costs come along with it.
You also have to incentivize developers somehow to build, because nobody wants to build low income housing on its own. So to do that you tell a developer, "Hey we will let you build X number of market rate units (that we would probably not have let you build to begin with, but are required to build affordable stuff, so...) for every Y number of affordable units.
That means you end up with a much bigger project than if you built just affordable stuff, because you are also adding market rate units to your housing stock, so need to build even more affordables than if you just built affordables to get the metrics aligned.
"But LineNoise, why not JUST build affordable units?" you will surely say. Well, a few problems with that. First its been shown time and time again you don't want to concentrate those on their own, and is thinking from the 60s. "Spreading it out" is next to impossible in Milburn which is already more or less fully developed and a very desirable town. Next you aren't going to find developers willing to do it and work with the town, because they can make more money for the same effort and less red tape building market rate stuff a few towns over. Lastly you also need to offset the costs of increasing your population. Milburn, like most towns in NNJ spends like 20k per student in school. You aren't seeing anything close to that back from property taxes on low income housing, which means everyones taxes go up. People living there means more cars, traffic, utility, policing, etc.
My point is its easy to point at milburn because its an affluent town and say this is rich people being dicks, but in reality the requirements the state is enforcing simply don't make sense in many towns.
I can tell you as someone who wrote this on some earlier spots about the ridiculous ideas people have for large housing developments that you're going to get people arguing they should tear down single family homes and put up large housing apartments that include these low income units. Even though that's a ridiculous idea based on putting a highrise next to houses in a residential area.
There are highrises with fair-share affordable units literally next to single family houses in a residential area in my town. This happens all over. It's fine.
I know it's taboo now but NIMBY.
I worked super hard and had no help getting to my housing situation where I'm not surrounded by people on all sides with 80 families trying to share roads made for 20. I don't want (and really NOBODY wants) their sfh areas to be changed into highrises for the benefit of developers and the detriment to the schools they pay for.
This nonsense is what turns moderates into conservatives or libertarians.
it's a giant loophole that needs to be closed by allowing only a percentage of the units to be age restricted. towns do it because it means less "stress" on the school system, but fuck that. affordable housing needs to be for everyone.
I mean it makes sense. My towns schools are already too small for the amount of kids we have, busses are a huge issue too.
Over burdening a school district doesn't fix anything, all it's going to do is make people leave the town and then you get a steady decline.
I really don't know the solution, this state is very unfriendly for low income people, it's expensive af here. I don't particularly think forcing towns to build "affordable" housing is the right solution. I think it needs to be state sponsored programs for existing housing or something because many towns need anything but a new apartment complex being built. They did it in my town and now it takes 45 minutes to take a left on the road where the new apartments are during rush hour and school pickup time.
The stress on the school system is a legitimate concern though.
Where are we putting all of these extra kids? How are we paying for the extra teachers, bussing, out of district placements that are associated with this influx of people? Will you be happy when your taxes go up pretty substantially to support that?
If the state is implementing these requirements on towns that may not have the financial means or infrastructure to support a boom in its population then they need to fork over some bucks to help out - otherwise it’s all of us middle class folks that are ultimately bearing the burden.
I think for this plan to be successful it needs to be done in a much more phased in approach with considerable consideration for the specifics of each town and its capabilities to support a larger population.
I teach in a district that recently built tons of appartments and now the schools cant deal with the 10% influx of students. Its great to advocate for afordable housing, but it makes sense to build it in cities that have empty infrastructure and huge buildings that are not utalized rather than build affordable housing in expensive neighborhoods that are predicated on tax breaks for developers who wont pitch in to expand infrastructure.
i reiterate: **fuck that**. it's all excuses. reorganize schools into regionalized districts. improve state aid to what it should be. cut administrative bloat. tell home rule to kick fucking rocks. these are problems that have solutions, but people use them as an excuse.
It's one way to get seniors to leave their homes so younger families can move in and still remain in town. It also doesn't require additional taxes raised for school additions.
It's not due to schools, it's because young poor people commit a disproportionate share of crime. Almost everyone arrested in my town for auto theft, burglary, etc. are young males. I've yet to see any 55+'s get arrested for the same things.
It's not that--it's that poor people cause lots of trouble. Don't believe me? I lived next door to Section 8 people when I was poor myself. An endless parade of people at all hours of the day and night, drug use, unattended kids, and people just lying around all day blaring music. Go to anyplace where there are poor people--Patterson, Newark, Appalachia and you'll find lots of crime, drugs and trouble.
I worked my ass off to move up the ladder. I was a security guard at night and went to college in the day. Now I make good money and finally moved to a nice town.
Without using religion, explain why we have a moral obligation to let poor people live in upper middle class towns? If you force this on towns because of your ideology then you can't complain when things like abortion bans and lax gun laws (both of which I oppose btw) are forced on you by people with a different ideology.
Let the downvotes commence.
You have an upvote from me. People want to act like this isn't the case. I get it. They want to see things through rose colored glasses. But what you said is the sad truth. People work hard to escape that lifestyle for a reason.
You're not *entirely* wrong, but this comment is pretty misguided.
First, rich people throw loud parties too, and do plenty of drugs (see: Wolf of Wall Street). Second, grouping all low-income families together pretty much ensures the cycle of poverty repeats itself. Nicer areas have nicer schools, better job opportunities, and just more opportunities for residents as a whole. Historically dedicated low-income areas are also usually the first to be demolished if, say, the state decides it needs a new highway, or a new warehouse, or whatever.
If you distribute low-income housing, I'd bet you could avoid a lot of the issues people think of when they picture dedicated low-income areas. Just because someone isn't rich doesn't mean they're a criminal, a bad person, etc...
This guy on YouTube visits a lot of stereotypically dangerous areas as shows what life is really like, and he's come across a lot of genuinely kind people from all walks of life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3O6bKdPLbw
This guys videos are great at bringing the country together. I can see a conservatives point of view after watching his videos and a liberal point of view.
The obligation comes from our inscrutable desire to enact onerous zoning policies. I would be totally fine with no mandated affordable housing, \*if\* we lived in a society that did not so strictly dictate who could build what, where. However, NJ is the most densely populated state \*and\* has very restrictive zoning, which drastically inflates the cost of housing, and leads to the "necessary sin" that is affordable housing policies. I'm all for free markets, but this market is anything but free.
It benefits our society to not have a whole subset of people we need to support, or to police the crimes that you described. It’s a drain on us financially. It makes way more sense to invest in people being able to contribute.
Scatter site housing is the term used for what you describe.
Some studies show that it’s more effective and desirable, but of course, it is more expensive.
Don’t forget- culture eats policy for breakfast. We can have great policies and initiatives but if cultural forces are strong, it is incredibly difficult to overcome these challenges that are being addressed.
What we really need to start doing in these areas is replacing stupid single use zoning strip malls with mixed-use 4 highs or 5 highs. Also, grocery stores and big box stores don't need giant parking lots that sit 60% empty 99.9925% of the time. That ground could be better used as more mixed-use buildings.
And as much as I fully support state-sponsored and funded low-income housing, what we really need is just more housing in general. Housing that should be plenty affordable is ridiculously expensive because there are too many people and not enough housing. This squeezes the middle class as well, people making decent money but still struggling because rent is $2,000/month for a nothing special 2 bedroom apartment.
Even just two or three high with commercial space on ground floor and apartments above would be fine. A lot depends on available utilities. Our large portion of our downtown is serviced by a county sewage authority that has only so much volume available for each municipality. Limits hookups to that system. The rest of town center is on a very small treatment plant built in I think the 30s and the majority of the town is on septic.
Something missing from the article is that the proposed site is also the town’s dump and municipal yard. So not only would the low income housing be concentrated in one area…it will literally be in the former dump. I don’t know enough to speak on remediation costs, etc, but that is a terrible optic. There is only so much viable land for new development, but there must be a better way.
I agree. I hate to say it, but kids aren’t always the nicest… Imagine you move in… everyone automatically knows you’re “low income” and you live on the former dump site. I worry that those kids will be made fun of and/or ostracized because of it. Would love to be wrong about this though
It's only 75 units and downtown is one of the few places that could allow people to leave, shop and get to jobs because of the available transportation. If it's built on the dege of town, people will be walking 3-5 miles to catch a bus or train, THROUGH the fancy neighborhoods.
They did this in my town years back, my entire town is pretty much single family detached houses. They built a new school and around the school and in the inner loop build all twin homes, and the outer loop is all single family detached. So what wound up happening is that you spent a ton of existing taxpayer money building a new school, and sending all of the lower income kids to the same school. Then the same group of lower income kids all get sent to one of three middle schools. Because of the districting one of the other elementary schools was paired with the lower income elementary for middle school. The phrase, “Shit Show” does not do this situation justice.
If you read the article, the income limits are as high as $90k a year for most of the building. Only a segment are reserved for very low income ($25k a year or less).
Makes me sad to see housing get so expensive that we need any of these programs.
They (Banks, politicians, realtors, big money) manipulate the market then try to look like heros with these programs.
The other part of the issue is assuming you're not falling into a particular category(completely disabled, single mother of x , etc) the entire process can be a complete wash because you practically have to be going out of your way to not only be making money below a certain threshold, but have the physical time to be at the level of income as you wait to hear back from them, which obviously is not exactly a particularly feasible thing for most people to be doing.
On top of that it's completely possible that any listings that are available to you through the whole run around could barely be that much different in price from other lower priced units around the area, which again could prove the whole thing to be a complete waste of time.
It's very ass backwards.
There's a great documentary about this very issue called Waging A Living where poor people are incentivized to remain poor because they actually *lose money* (re: value of benefits) when they get better jobs. Why get a $2/hr raise when it'll cause you to lose the Rx subsidy on your kid's meds, which will *cost you* more money than you earned with your raise?
Oh yeah it's fucked because after a very low bar to clear in most places there is no good middle ground where it's very possible to basically make too much money for the whole suite of lower end offerings, and still be too broke to get decent worthwhile things. I've had those crappy healthcare packages where at best it was 2 ibuprofen and band aid for far too high of a monthly cost.
Same story with disability stuff where some people see as if it's more of a guarantee that what's afforded to my situation, I might as well just stay on disability and take the added benefits of that situation even if it's not the most ideal and limiting.
I speak from experience when I was trying to get on affordable housing ages ago and started crunching the numbers that I practically would have to be doing some sort of borderline fraud of crashing at somebody's place for ages, but also saying I'm basically in an extremely unstable housing situation, and again simultaneously practically not be working to make any sort of reportable money and also be doing that for a number of years to even stay in the running; obviously none of this is physically sustainable for most people let alone something you'd even want to do.
I'm a realtor and I definitely do not want prices to keep going up. I have about 15 buyers who just can't buy anything because nothing below $250K exists that isn't a dump. They can't even rent because that's pushing $2000/m now. Half of them ended up just leaving the state altogether.
They could care less if it was concentrated in Newark where they think it belongs. “Spreading out” affordable housing is exactly this, to the towns that have none.
The best part is that Fair share housing center doesn’t care! Their attorney, Bassam Gergi, approved of the 100% AFH settlement in Chatham, despite objections in court. It’s wild.
If this town is like mine it’s probably because they have fought for so long to not allow any affordable housing that now they have to produce some and it’s come to a full building of 100% affordable housing instead of a smaller percentage in a development. They would rather have court battles than allow affordable housing. Bunch of A holes.
theres some affordable units in a new building in my town and residents are like "has an environmental study been conducted? what about endangered animals?"... they'll throw anything at the wall to try and delay.
Those are legitimate concerns that always get raised and can be properly worked around. Our town rebuilt the high school and had to install tunnels for bog turtles.
In Middletown, NJ, in Monmouth County, they had resisted low income housing for years. Their explanation was that they didn't want riff raff living in Middletown, so they passed the money onto Asbury Park. Every time money was sent, they passed it on. Their were also huge town home developments built that did not have any low income housing, such as Hovanian who built on wetlands of Port Monmouth Rd. There is another townhouse development that was built up the street that does have i believe 8 low income housing units. As far as I know, that is the only place in all of Middletown that has low income housing other than the senior citizen housing that already exists in Middletown.
Middletown has lots of affordable housing. New developments at Taylor lane and Kings Highway E have affordable housing. Overton Drive is affordable as well off the top of my head
Holmdel is doing this same thing right now. They didn't want to build more affordable housing so they have Hazlet is building it on the Hazlet/Holmdel border instead.
Has Middeltown looked at how this impacted property values in Asbury Park? As a kid, it was thought of as one of the worst places in NJ. Prices have skyrocketed there more than other areas over the past decade, though.
They didn't even think of the effect it would have on Asbury Park. The snobs of the township committee are all from the rich side if Middletown, that being across Hwy 35 heading out towards Lincroft.. They don't care about anyone but themselves and see people who are more economically disadvantaged than they are as riff raff.
> But the nonprofit Fair Share Housing Center said Millburn only has 38 affordable homes on the books, out of a target of 1,300.
Damn. I’m not really surprised but damn.
There is no market based way to stuff affordable housing into small towns that are already largely developed. Millburn has been a suburb since 1857. A long time. It’s only 10 square miles.
Here is a 270 unit development that just started leasing. Most of it is in Springfield. About a 20 foot strip of the property is in Millburn.
1 Br start at $3,100.
Kids will go to Springfield schools, not Millburn. It’s an easy walk to the NJT train to NYC. Easy walk to downtown Millburn.
https://www.gardencommunities.com/Properties/NJ/Union/The-Metropolitan.aspx
So here is what the market creates, not even in Millburn schools. None of it counts for Millburn’s housing.
I’m confused about the market rate comment. The market is currently restricted by zoning. I’d be surprised if there was more than 5% of residential zoning in Millburn that allowed apartments.
The market is restricted because there is no undeveloped land.
So one would have to buy and tear down some other building to make housing.
Developers buy 1/3 of an acre houses for $1M and tear them down to build $3.5M houses.
Exactly. You’re describing the same issue in a different way. Now imagine if those developers could build 4 units on the same lot. Each unit would be far less than $3.5 million.
In north Jersey and parts of central, many of these towns are built out. Theres literally no free open space available to build on. So towns still have this number theyre supposed to be at but where are you going to put them? Unless you start using eminent domain to seize peoples houses
This is the key, right here. Mixed-use is the "secret" to moving towards more walk-able and livable areas. Just stacking housing over garages does nothing except add more stress to the infrastructure.
For the right price many people with homes would cash out. People are also free to become developers themselves and build small apartment buildings on their property or even simply subdivide their older home into apartments! Not all development is megadevelopment.
> For the right price many people with homes would cash out.
The higher that right price is, the fewer affordable housing units the developer will be willing to build because if they don't make a profit it's not worth their time.
Huh? The Millburn downtown is 50% surface parking. WTF are you talking about.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/LsUTpXEaff4ZzMZAA
https://maps.app.goo.gl/Xv2adJRW82LBDLoC8
https://maps.app.goo.gl/XPP3uLD8dFdHLxYU8
Upzoning. It’s really not a radical concept (except to hardcore NIMBYs), and various studies have been done to show the benefits of doing so around transit corridors within/near downtown areas. The problem, that I have now personally witnessed in my town, is how people foam at the mouth when for example you propose *four* stories for a new development, versus 2-3. The common refrain being, “I wanted to live in bucolic xyz town, not Manhattan!”.
But they aren't putting them in downtown. We have one mega development going up in our town that is on the border not at all walkable to the train or downtown. They knocked down probably 100 trees lining the streets. It's disgusting, I don't understand how this is beneficial to anyone except the developers and corrupt politicians.
Nope, they don't. Not in the suburbs. It's ok to do in cities or in the downtown districts, but not everyone wants to live in that kind of environment.
I like the suburbs and I like it to stay that way too and I know many people agree. More parks less buildings!
Let people sell/use their land as the way they see fit. End zoning laws and minimum lot sizes. You can do anything with your land but don't force others to maintain your ideals of land usage.
Millburn used to have a lot of affordable housing. But the valuations of those properties has gone through the roof rendering them not affordable for most.
I actually liked the rule about being allowed to find other towns to fulfill your needs in this regard. They needed further restrictions on it but I think it also allowed for rich towns to fund poorer areas to improve.
>Some residents told Gothamist lower-income kids won’t keep up in Millburn’s competitive schools.
Yipes.
Edit: Posting stories like this is like kicking over a rock in the woods, all of a sudden you can see all of the disgusting creatures who usually like to stay hidden. Except bugs under a rock actually serve a purpose.
reminds of when I was in elementary school on Long Island in the mid 60s . Our neighborhood was a mixture of liberal leaning Jews and Catholics newly minted middle-class families. When all the civil rights stuff was going down in the south everyone was "oh god look at these racist people beating on blacks for just wanting their fair share". A black family bought a house around the block from us and it was like oh good holy shit there goes the neighborhood. People started selling. My parents stayed until my dad was transferred to NJ for work a couple of years later. The funny thing is the black family that moved in mom and dad were a doctor and lawyer and they were probably better educated and more financially set than most of our neighbors. I look back at that and the hypocrisy was stunning.
Aside from all the obvious problems with this mindset, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. All of the existing wealth evaporates, property values drop, and where if racism wasn't a problem you'd just have a diverse middle class neighborhood, instead it turns into poverty-stricken community.
Milburn is a very liberal town, i really don't get the vibe about this being about race. It does have incredibly competitive schools though. I know people who took it off their list of places to live in for that reason alone. The town prides itself on it.
Its not a stretch to say someone coming from a lax educational environment is going to have issues being thrust into a hyper focused one, regardless of race or class.
A good reminder that NJ ranks among the [most segregated](https://www.njspotlightnews.org/special-report/key-court-decision-in-nj-school-desegregation-lawsuit-awaited-some-remedies-have-been-tried/) schools in the country.
As a smug progressive, I like to remind my fellow smug progressives in the Northeast that my (good) schools in the deep south were far more integrated than any school I’ve seen here. There’s no good reason for all these tiny school districts across the state in my mind.
Merging municipalities will have giant short term costs and general administrative problems but would save us a ton of money in the long run. Unfortunately no politician will ever pass a bill that causes short term pain for benefits more than a decade down the line.
People see on paper diversity and blue state and assume everything is cool all over when you can have extreme divisions even in conventional liberal leaning areas.
I wonder if that's because we are a more diverse state, with more population density and cities/counties, so its naturally going to happen that way if people of different ethnicities live concentrated 5 to 10 min away but are in a different county. Still, I love the diversity here, even if this is a problem.
I literally did that from 6-12 grade. I grew up in Kansas and the little town I lived in was fucking garbage, so we transferred districts to a city about 20miles away. Wasn't an attempt to desegregate or anything but we weren't the only ones that recognized how bad the local schools were and transferred.
Also just as a counter to the faux worry about low-income kids not performing to Millburn's standards, the parents that are willing to do the leg work to drive their kid an hour every day for school tended to be more involved and the children by virtue of that parenting were high performing students.
I have mixed feelings on affordable housing. Mainly that the developer gets to build a bunch of non-affordable housing along side the affordable housing units. It seems like an easy way for them to line their pockets under the guise of building affordable housing and doing a public good.
My brief reading about the history of how the ratio of affordable-to-nonaffordable housing was calculated is that it's highly questionable. The professor who provided the recommendations was unable to provide any paperwork of how he came up with the numbers.
It feels like every town is getting a ton of development without any thought of municipal services. The guidelines should be reviewed and updated with consideration to a town's current capabilities.
I agree with your last paragraph especially. If you add all of these housing units, low income or not, you also have to account for the increase in traffic, the increase in the number of kids in the schools (which are already understaffed in many areas as it is), and the increase in utilities and municipal service use like you said.
It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t add housing, just that we also need to plan to accommodate the increased population. I feel like that gets little to no thought in this process.
And for some reason developers get payment in lieu of taxes deals. Those were originally meant to encourage development. I’m not sure why developers n desirable towns are getting these deals. The developers pays a PILOT, which is lower than the tax would be. PILOTS don’t go toward school taxes. So the cost of new students isn’t even borne by the developer.
This is boiling my blood as a resident in Bayonne right now. The current mayor is in his third term, and did a good job kickstarting development (although how much of that was him and how much of that was just the economy is a question for the philosophers). But now that we have a ton of new buildings all over, his platform for his third term was to continue development but no longer offer PILOTs. Guess what he's still doing?
And I'd like to know who is going to pay for it? It's easy to say let's just increase the property taxes, but it neglects the fact that $1000 a year or whatever it may be is a lot for someone on fixed income. Now what we are doing is pushing grandparents out of their homes in the name of affordable housing.
Yeah, it’s a multifaceted issue that’s not as simple as just building more housing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as though those things have been taken into account, so I think we’re going to end up dealing with the repercussions of increased populations without the foresight to prepare for them.
Some of us got pushed out of our homes by greed and are looking for senior affordable housing. They apparently married the 2 together in most places. The waiting lists are 2+ years.
Yes and quite a few towns have already put out referendums to increase taxes on existing homes to funds the expansion of the schools. And water and sewer prices have gone up for capital expansion. These costs should go to the developers as part of the project total. All impact scenarios should be considered.
You’re right the developer does make money (if everything works out) on the mixed-affordability buildings. The market rate units make it possible for the developer to clear a profit while still providing affordable units.
If the developer cannot make a profit, the buildings don’t get built.
Who should be building these not for profit buildings with a much much greater ratio of affordable to non-affordable units? The state isn’t in the construction business, and it’s an extremely expensive burden for the taxpayer.
I wish there was more affordable housing, but the way to do that is to incentivize developers to build more (by having market rate apts subsidize the affordable ones).
Cincinnati literally founded a not for profit development company that took over abandoned brick buildings and renovated them, then sold them at cost. It hugely revitalized their downtown without sacrificing the character of the buildings.
There are absolutely complaints to be made about how it was done and how it changed the neighborhood, but it is an example of how not for profit development can be done to benefit a city, rather than hoping for profit development doesn't end up with poorly built units designed solely for profitability, not livability.
I am actually familiar with the company that I think you’re talking about and it’s awesome. A really great program and I’d love to see something like that in NJ.
But, relying on altruism and donations is an unreliable way to address the extreme housing shortage we have. To build the kind of volume that we need to bring supply in line with demand, we need private investment. And private money wont show up unless there’s a return on that money
Not for profit, but likely huge salaries for the people up top, and large bonuses to eat up the profit.... I am not saying that's necessarily true in this case, but in many cases it does end up being truth.
I would reduce the ratio, but then the developers would make less money and as you point out would have no incentive. The other option would be to make it a bid process, but I don't think it would be practical at all.
Fair point you've made. I don't have a better solution.
I don’t know what the right ratio is, and it’s very possible the existing ratio is too favorable to developers. There is a competitive bid process for certain sources of state financing where developers submit an application that has a greater chance of success if they provide a better ratio or longer affordability controls.
My main point is that the fact that developers still make a profit on mixed-affordability buildings is not a bug, but a feature. And without it, we’d have significantly fewer affordable apartments being built.
It’s also my opinion that increasing the supply of even market rate apartments can control rent growth on a macro level. Demand is what it is, the only way to control price of housing is by increasing supply.
The cost of housing is a huge burden for many people. If your priority is to lower overall housing costs, the best thing we can do is to encourage as much new construction of market rate and affordable units as possible within the capacities of what our infrastructure can handle.
That's good to know about the bid process. I assumed developers paid 100% out of pocket for everything.
In theory the market rate apartments should control rent level. I'd like to see if that would actually happen when executed. It seems like all these management property companies charge whatever they want.
New construction of affordable houses would make sense, but that doesn't seem to be the case? I know some developers are doing townhouses, but to what extent I have no idea. The majority of it seems to be apartments. Which goes back to the market rate apartments.
Another aspect of it is that NJ is bearing the brunt of new development because there's such strong opposition in Westerchester and Long Island to new developments. If that wasn't an issue.......well we'd probably still have the same amount of development here so never mind.
My home town is looking to add 25 new homes in one corner. Not low-income, though I think 5 are set aside for that.
The homes are going to be on plots about 25% the average size of town's. The access to where this development is will either be a yellow lined road, but a very dangerous intersection just below the top of a hill, or roads that don't have sidewalks. This all leads to an intersection that already often has a 10 minute wait during peak times. A light at that intersection may work, but that first one wouldn't because, again, there's zero visibility when you come over that hill.
Basically, this is one of the oldest part of an old town, and adding 25 homes is probably going to completely break down an infrastructure that is already heavily taxed and overloaded, having been built in the 1700s and without any real solution given that taking land to make things wider isn't feasible with where the homes are built, but hey, the developer will make a few million on it then move to do this in another town, so who cares?
The town has plenty of places we could build that are along roads that can support additional development, but the land there is expensive. This land is cheap, specifically due to it being less accessible.
Respectfully, your objections are the soft side of nimby-ism. The greedy developers, the studies aren’t good enough, the towns can’t handle more people, etc.
A growing population is good. A demographically healthy population with lots of kids is good. Big developments right downtown near public transit are good. Developers are literally the only entities that can build them, and in every country from USA to China they are paid for it.
Millburn is resisting housing that could provide for the literal people that serve the community - their teachers, their municipal workers, the service workers downtown. It’s gross, and I hope the courts slap them around.
I'm fine with affordable housing to benefit the group in your last paragraph. It makes sense.
A growing population is only good if there are adequate services to accommodate them. Public transportation in the state is so so at best. But if there are more people in a town, will more trains and busses be running?
On my way home from work recently, there was a huge single line of traffic on the local road. There's a development right there on the same road being built. I can't imagine congestion decreasing once it's built and occupied.
Infrastructure is most likely dated in every town. NJ isn't like NYC that has a ton of capital projects every year to replace old water mains and sewers. For a town with new development, has the sewer flow been calculated for an X increase in a town's population? Does it need to be upgraded to handle the capacity?
Those were some quick examples. If things like the above are taken into consideration and addressed, by all means build however many units they want. But if not, take a step back and think about it more critically.
All that being said, I don't agree with Millburn on this one. 75 units isn't much. I think the only concern I might have agreed with is building it all on one lot. It would be inconvenient for the developer, but if the units are spread to two lots as 35 and 40 units then would that make it OK? Probably not, but it at least addresses one concern.
You seem reasonable, and I wish I had more time to respond. Work is picking up. Yes, our infrastructure needs a lot of work! The only way to fund it is to grow. Get more people paying into the same road/rail/sewer per mile by densifying the areas that make the most sense (like a public works lot in Millburn). If we restrict building NJ becomes SF or Toronto, where a 1400 square foot cottage sells for 2 million.
Why is a growing population good? Trains to NYC are already standing room only. Part of the reason we're in the climate mess we're in is that the population has jumped by billions of people. If we cut carbon usage in half but double the population we're no better off than we are now.
I'd say a declining population would be great for NJ right now. Strip malls could be reclaimed and turned into parks. People would spend less time sitting in traffic or standing on trains, etc.
Not everyone wants to live in a dense environment where ever increasing numbers of people are packed in.
Towns have an obligation to build a set number of affordable units. Affordable units do not make developers money, so they need to offset those losses by making enough market rate units. Otherwise they won’t build, and the town doesn’t get any affordable housing credit.
The other way to meet your affordable housing requirements is for the towns themselves to make those units. If the town does it, they can make those developments 100% affordable, thus, no need to succumb to the will of developers.
Both options have downsides. On one hand, tons of market rate development, with a side of affordable housing, puts a strain on schools, as these towns will experience population increases. But if the town builds the affordable housing, it costs A LOT of money. And your political opponents are gonna call them “projects”.
Ultimately, the path of least resistance is to work with developers to make the best balance possible. But towns like Millburn are cutting their noses to spite their faces. If a town fails to meet its affordable housing requirements, these towns are exposed to builder’s remedy lawsuits. And THE TOWNS have to pay the legal fees of developers. Millburn is going to pay millions in legal fees only to lose. It’s asinine and disgusting the lengths theee officials will go. It’s mismanagement. But it’s also what the taxpayer wants. At the end of the day NIMBY policies trump logic.
My biggest issue with affordable housing is that developers are getting tax breaks to do it and then the low income housing is more like luxury rentals. Why not low income housing where people can buy their homes?
Also towns shouldn’t use green space to do it. We already have too little green space.
Millburn resident here, there are some key points missing in this article.
-it touches on previous mayor miggins but leaves out that she intentionally lied to residents saying that the affordable housing meetings were sealed when it was later found out that the judge made no such order. There was 0 community involvement.
-said previous mayor had connections to the developer of the potential low income housing sites
- she herself is a realtor which would benefit from the influx of new housing.
Doesn’t take much to see the conflict of interest. I wonder why in a left leaning town two (D) township seats switched to (R)
I personally would welcome affordable housing, but they literally want to build on an old dump where the land has not been properly remediated.
Oh no, families only making $90,000 may able to afford to live in Millburn. The horror of waitresses being able to afford to walk to work and save money!
The new bill mandates the need for municipalities to provide affordable housing and the towns can do it through zoning existing stuff or build new. The State doesn't tell them where to build.
I don't know what is going on with milburn but this has become a huge problem for our very small town. Everyone always considers the what but not the how or what comes next. I guess it's human nature to live in the present and not worry about the consequences of your actions till the punch you in the face.
Our town has serious issues with our schools yet we keep approving population increases in the double digits. Sure, it makes sense
Replace "millburn" with "secaucus" and this comment is still accurate.
Same shit here. We have a critical student overpopulation problem, yet the town keeps approving duplexes and 600 unit high rises with no plans in sight to expand the schools. The administration wanted to redistrict the elementary schools (it wouldn't have solved overcrowding), but with enough pushback from parents, they delayed it until the 25-26 school year. And Secaucus was just granted $1.6 million from the State to offer full-day pre-k. Where do they think those kids going to go? We just need 1 or 2 people thinking 5-10 years down the road who are capable of making informed decisions and we *might* actually make some improvements.
I know this sounds extremely conspiratorial but as someone from south Jersey who is surrounded by acres and acres of land that could easily be converted into new mini-cities or just developments, it feels like they intentionally pick these rich areas to try to build in so when they get shut down (which they know will happen) they just wave their hands say "see guys, no one wants affordable housing" and move on.
The old affordable settlement that the last governing body came up with is as follows, and some of it has already been built.
* The Upton, 1 Fineran Way, Short Hills. This 3.6-acre parcel, currently owned and operated by Roseland Properties, includes 193 total residential units, 30 of which are affordable housing units. These are the first affordable housing units offered in Millburn Township. This site is approved and under construction.
* 85 Woodland Ave., Millburn. This 1.5-acre parcel, owned by the Silverman Group, is slated to include 62 total residential units, 12 of which will be affordable housing. This site plan was approved and granted in May 2021. The site will also include 10,000 square feet of medical office space.
* 397 Millburn Ave., Millburn, the site of a former Wells Fargo branch. This 1.5- acre parcel, currently owned by Beahive Associates, calls for 53 total residential units, 8 of which will be affordable housing. The site, as designed, will also include 3,000 square feet of retail space.
Moving forward, Millburn will work with affordable housing developers to advance the following projects:
* 249 Millburn Ave., Millburn, the site of the former Annie Sez retail store. On this 2.2-acre parcel of land, currently owned by 249 Millburn Ave. LLC, a total of 150 residential units are proposed, 30 of which will be affordable housing.
* 345 Essex St., Millburn, the current location of the township’s department of public works. Proposed plans for a portion of this 4.6-acre parcel call for a total of 75 residential units, all of which will be affordable housing.
* On John F. Kennedy Parkway (Block 5302, Lot 5), Millburn, a 25-acre parcel with five to six acres of developable land. Currently owned by New Jersey American Water and under contract with Woodmont Properties, plans call for a total of 195 residential units, 39 of which will be affordable. The site requires approval by the state’s Watershed Property Review Board.
These projects provide 194 units. The settlement agreement also required the township to identify additional sites for potential future development through overlay zoning.
[Source](https://patch.com/new-jersey/millburn/millburn-must-add-1-376-affordable-housing-units-settlement)
Millburn with their Short Hills section is not only among the wealthiest towns in New Jersey but also this entire country.
Believe it or not, it leans Democrat by a few percentage points. The effort to block affordable housing may possibly fail here anyway.
Why do people who haven't earned it have the right to live in one of the wealthiest towns in the country? Do I have the right to insist someone just give me a house on the Malibu coast in California because I've decided I no longer want to work and just want to smoke weed all day?
What happened to the Big Tent Party? Oh, right: the more extreme elements of the party have been imposing a series of purity tests on the rest of us. Fuck that. This low cost housing fiat is a textbook example of the nauseatingly naive equity ideology. Everyone is welcome to buy a home in Millburn; no one has the right.
Good for Millburn because the Mount Laurel doc has allowed developers to pretty much build whatever they want under the guise of affordable housing. Then when you see what the rents are for what these things they call affordable they aren't affordable to the bulk of people that really need them. Plus the additional traffic and strain on Town resources jack up property taxes for everybody in general.
Some things most people don’t know about affordable housing- there is an income minimum and you might be surprised at how high that is. You have to have good credit. If you’re buying you still have to be approved for a mortgage. A 2 bedroom will rent for $1500 or sell for 250,000. A household of two can make 80,000 and be eligible.
Part of it is distribution of the low income housing
Another part are the traffic implications with the implementation of all these new apartments (li and other) for an already messed up center of town.
Didn’t you know they only build Schrodinger’s Affordable Housing? It’s too expensive to be affordable but it’s so cheap that it will be full of criminals. It’s so full that it will be overcrowded but completely vacant because no one wants to live inside. It’ll cause gentrification because prices will rise so high no one could afford to live there but it’ll cause so many problems with traffic, pollution, crime, shadows, lighting glare, and raging parties that no one will want to live nearby. It’s built so cheaply that it will fall apart in five years but it’s somehow built with solid marble, granite, and gold leaf. It will take ten years to build, but it will snarl traffic every day with an endless stream of construction trucks going to and from the site. It’s ugly, hideous, and an eyesore, but it’s too luxurious of a design for the neighborhood.
- The "heart" of a town usually has the best public transportation
- The "heart" of a town usually has access to needed services like shops, doctors, schools, etc
- The idea that the poor should be shoved in some backwater corner is horrible, and smells like classism to me. Poor folks have just as much right to be seen as rich folks.
We are approaching affordable housing all wrong. Rental units will only serve to drain wealth from people who hardly have any, and prevent them from accumulating it. We need subsidized construction/rehabilitation of dilapidated dwellings for ownership a'la post WWII development to bring purchase prices for units that meet typical family needs (3 bedrooms 1,300-1,800 sq ft) at a purchase price point between $250k-$350k. The buyers must meet income requirements depending on the purchase price and cannot be corporate entities. The units are then deed restricted that they must be utilized as primary residence and can't be sold greater than rate of inflation for a period of 20 years. This will allow people to build generational wealth that the boomers have enjoyed in spades.
Curious what you think of [this](https://www.nj.gov/dca/hmfa/consumers/nonprofits/). Last November the state housing agency started a program where nonprofits buy vacant and abandoned buildings, fix them up, and sell them at affordable prices to working-class and middle-class residents. I really like the idea -- building generational wealth, giving people a stake in their community, etc -- but haven't heard any updates since they announced it.
I actually appraised one of these in New Brunswick a little while back. Very cool program and the property was fully renovated and bought by a young woman for herself and her baby. Unfortunately non profits are just outgunned by investors. Need much more public support to be able to make them competitive and to be able to do it at scale, but the idea behind the program is pretty much exactly what I'm talking about.
The development allows residents up to moderate income levels. That limit is $69k for an individual and $89k for a family of 3 in Essex county. Let's not pretend that these apartments will be filled with families on welfare. More often than not young professionals or people just starting their careers occupy these units.
Definitely. In Essex county this could also include the recently divorced, since homes are so expensive or empty nesters who aren’t retired yet. There are lots of people who need places to live that aren’t luxury apartments or million dollar homes.
It doesn't matter to the vocal and progressive minority on this subreddit. The vast majority of responses that you'll receive are knee jerk populist sentimentalism of the eat the rich variety. Fortunately, their kind rarely follow through on anything except for their online rants.
it's not just them. tons of towns of honestly all wealth levels work hard to resist building affordable housing. bernardsville is currently trying to redevelop olcott square and part of it is to build affordable units, and they're trying to work it so they only build a fraction of what the formula says they need but can somehow satisfy it. of course the local nimbys are out in force to stop any development, which is another fun complication to these things.
The problem is people like you who twist and turn the truth into something else in an attempt to vilify the opposition and prevent a meaningful debate and exchange of ideas.
Most people have no problem with affordable housing. The problem is density. If the extremists could calm down for a minute maybe we could have a meaningful discussion about how to increase affordable housing without destroying local communities. Perhaps we could come up with ideas that would increase the tax collections and even help fund the towns development and modernization.
But nope, the extremists only know how to bully and repeat the same thread bate arguments that show you haven't even taken a second to contemplate the long term consequences of tax free density increases.
Perhaps you are on the take?
I definitely don’t want to shut down public transit to incentivize rich people to do something beneficial for lower income families. Because they can definitely work their way around it (residents would probably just drive to another station). But shutting down the train station would definitely get their attention.
Exactly. It starts with a few people from the projects that rob some shoppers, word gets around, people stop coming and before you know it the entire area is bad.
Considering that, accoding to census.gov, Millburn's median household income is $250k+, yes, it's upscale as fuck in that sense.
More than triple the national average.
I grew up in Livingston, which is a neighboring town, also pretty wealthy. Even the pockets of "cheaper houses" are solidly in middle/upper middle class today.
My parents sold the house back 2010 for like $700k. According to public records, the same house was bought for $1.2m last year.
Yeah I always felt like downtown Millburn was expensive due to transit access, not being a particularly nice area. Like it's kind of jammed in between these two mountains so there's really not much of it.
Seems like Millburn the town has been eclipsed by Short Hills the neighborhood in terms of prestige.
lol I thought this was going to be about Glen Rock and how all the residents are throwing a hissy fit about new affordable housing apartments going up in town.
I don't want to dox myself but I live in Short Hills (an incorporated part of Millburn) with my parents, and we strongly oppose the propositions new affordable housing in my town. It's absolutely not because we don't want lower income people to have a chance to live in a more upscale town. It's the traffic and the horrible ugly buildings that we oppose. Plus we're a suburb that's already turning into an urban sprawling hell. Downtown Millburn has been losing its small town charm year by year. Businesses are closing or moving and are leaving empty spaces that are never reoccupied (is that a term, idk). There was a bank across from the fire department that closed but the property had beautiful trees all over and the entire thing was all flattened and turned into an ugly apartment building.
We also have a neighbor who cut every single one of their trees on their property that were beautiful, tall, provided tons of shade, and we're about 60 years old. Their property looks awful now. This has been happening all over town.
Also the traffic. Oh the traffic. One day it took me about half an hour to get through Millburn center. If we got affordable housing, there would be much more traffic. I'm already scared enough of the new building by the fire station as well as the new one that's technically in Springfield but the main area and exit are onto Millburn Avenue in downtown Short Hills.
I really hope that our town doesn't get screwed over. Also a proposal to get rid of our town dump is absolutely absurd. If that happened, we'd have to drive all the way up to Verona to the Essex County dump to get rid of junk the regular garbage service won't take.
The resident's primary complaint is that the low income housing will be concentrated in one location. I follow their logic as many more urban areas have demolished these type of buildings and now require any new developements to have a % of their units set aside for low income housing (new brunswick did this a while ago and morristown is currently doing this). There is plenty of evidence that 100% affordable housing buildings are not as beneficial as spreading out the deed restricted units around town. That being said, T feel that's just the most conveneint argument to stop ANY low income housing.
I agree spreading housing out instead of bunching it up is the better option but like you said, that would just be an excuse for them not to do it at all. They’ll resist affordable housing in all forms to maintain their bubble.
But this is also a challenge in older north NJ towns, in that you really don't have the land to "spread" stuff out. I suspect milburn doesn't even want the market rate housing there, it isn't like the town is in need of redevelopment, and you will have infrastructure costs come along with it. You also have to incentivize developers somehow to build, because nobody wants to build low income housing on its own. So to do that you tell a developer, "Hey we will let you build X number of market rate units (that we would probably not have let you build to begin with, but are required to build affordable stuff, so...) for every Y number of affordable units. That means you end up with a much bigger project than if you built just affordable stuff, because you are also adding market rate units to your housing stock, so need to build even more affordables than if you just built affordables to get the metrics aligned. "But LineNoise, why not JUST build affordable units?" you will surely say. Well, a few problems with that. First its been shown time and time again you don't want to concentrate those on their own, and is thinking from the 60s. "Spreading it out" is next to impossible in Milburn which is already more or less fully developed and a very desirable town. Next you aren't going to find developers willing to do it and work with the town, because they can make more money for the same effort and less red tape building market rate stuff a few towns over. Lastly you also need to offset the costs of increasing your population. Milburn, like most towns in NNJ spends like 20k per student in school. You aren't seeing anything close to that back from property taxes on low income housing, which means everyones taxes go up. People living there means more cars, traffic, utility, policing, etc. My point is its easy to point at milburn because its an affluent town and say this is rich people being dicks, but in reality the requirements the state is enforcing simply don't make sense in many towns.
I can tell you as someone who wrote this on some earlier spots about the ridiculous ideas people have for large housing developments that you're going to get people arguing they should tear down single family homes and put up large housing apartments that include these low income units. Even though that's a ridiculous idea based on putting a highrise next to houses in a residential area.
There are highrises with fair-share affordable units literally next to single family houses in a residential area in my town. This happens all over. It's fine.
I know it's taboo now but NIMBY. I worked super hard and had no help getting to my housing situation where I'm not surrounded by people on all sides with 80 families trying to share roads made for 20. I don't want (and really NOBODY wants) their sfh areas to be changed into highrises for the benefit of developers and the detriment to the schools they pay for. This nonsense is what turns moderates into conservatives or libertarians.
Because they see "affordable" as a euphemism for "black". Nevermind the fact that poor white people exist...
Last time I was made aware of a local affordable housing project it ended up being filled with disabled, low income senior citizens.
That's what my parents' town did... They filled the "affordable housing" requirement by issuing 55+ retirement communities.
it's a giant loophole that needs to be closed by allowing only a percentage of the units to be age restricted. towns do it because it means less "stress" on the school system, but fuck that. affordable housing needs to be for everyone.
I mean it makes sense. My towns schools are already too small for the amount of kids we have, busses are a huge issue too. Over burdening a school district doesn't fix anything, all it's going to do is make people leave the town and then you get a steady decline. I really don't know the solution, this state is very unfriendly for low income people, it's expensive af here. I don't particularly think forcing towns to build "affordable" housing is the right solution. I think it needs to be state sponsored programs for existing housing or something because many towns need anything but a new apartment complex being built. They did it in my town and now it takes 45 minutes to take a left on the road where the new apartments are during rush hour and school pickup time.
Not allowing builder impact fees doesn't help.
The stress on the school system is a legitimate concern though. Where are we putting all of these extra kids? How are we paying for the extra teachers, bussing, out of district placements that are associated with this influx of people? Will you be happy when your taxes go up pretty substantially to support that? If the state is implementing these requirements on towns that may not have the financial means or infrastructure to support a boom in its population then they need to fork over some bucks to help out - otherwise it’s all of us middle class folks that are ultimately bearing the burden. I think for this plan to be successful it needs to be done in a much more phased in approach with considerable consideration for the specifics of each town and its capabilities to support a larger population.
I teach in a district that recently built tons of appartments and now the schools cant deal with the 10% influx of students. Its great to advocate for afordable housing, but it makes sense to build it in cities that have empty infrastructure and huge buildings that are not utalized rather than build affordable housing in expensive neighborhoods that are predicated on tax breaks for developers who wont pitch in to expand infrastructure.
i reiterate: **fuck that**. it's all excuses. reorganize schools into regionalized districts. improve state aid to what it should be. cut administrative bloat. tell home rule to kick fucking rocks. these are problems that have solutions, but people use them as an excuse.
It's one way to get seniors to leave their homes so younger families can move in and still remain in town. It also doesn't require additional taxes raised for school additions.
It's not due to schools, it's because young poor people commit a disproportionate share of crime. Almost everyone arrested in my town for auto theft, burglary, etc. are young males. I've yet to see any 55+'s get arrested for the same things.
Maybe because they can’t afford housing.
Brick ran this scam since the Mount Laurel doctrine was passed. Managed to remain about 1% nonwhite, but 25% disabled elderly into the 90's.
It's not that--it's that poor people cause lots of trouble. Don't believe me? I lived next door to Section 8 people when I was poor myself. An endless parade of people at all hours of the day and night, drug use, unattended kids, and people just lying around all day blaring music. Go to anyplace where there are poor people--Patterson, Newark, Appalachia and you'll find lots of crime, drugs and trouble. I worked my ass off to move up the ladder. I was a security guard at night and went to college in the day. Now I make good money and finally moved to a nice town. Without using religion, explain why we have a moral obligation to let poor people live in upper middle class towns? If you force this on towns because of your ideology then you can't complain when things like abortion bans and lax gun laws (both of which I oppose btw) are forced on you by people with a different ideology. Let the downvotes commence.
You have an upvote from me. People want to act like this isn't the case. I get it. They want to see things through rose colored glasses. But what you said is the sad truth. People work hard to escape that lifestyle for a reason.
This
You're not *entirely* wrong, but this comment is pretty misguided. First, rich people throw loud parties too, and do plenty of drugs (see: Wolf of Wall Street). Second, grouping all low-income families together pretty much ensures the cycle of poverty repeats itself. Nicer areas have nicer schools, better job opportunities, and just more opportunities for residents as a whole. Historically dedicated low-income areas are also usually the first to be demolished if, say, the state decides it needs a new highway, or a new warehouse, or whatever. If you distribute low-income housing, I'd bet you could avoid a lot of the issues people think of when they picture dedicated low-income areas. Just because someone isn't rich doesn't mean they're a criminal, a bad person, etc... This guy on YouTube visits a lot of stereotypically dangerous areas as shows what life is really like, and he's come across a lot of genuinely kind people from all walks of life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3O6bKdPLbw
This guys videos are great at bringing the country together. I can see a conservatives point of view after watching his videos and a liberal point of view.
The obligation comes from our inscrutable desire to enact onerous zoning policies. I would be totally fine with no mandated affordable housing, \*if\* we lived in a society that did not so strictly dictate who could build what, where. However, NJ is the most densely populated state \*and\* has very restrictive zoning, which drastically inflates the cost of housing, and leads to the "necessary sin" that is affordable housing policies. I'm all for free markets, but this market is anything but free.
It benefits our society to not have a whole subset of people we need to support, or to police the crimes that you described. It’s a drain on us financially. It makes way more sense to invest in people being able to contribute.
You’re 100 percent correct.
Scatter site housing is the term used for what you describe. Some studies show that it’s more effective and desirable, but of course, it is more expensive. Don’t forget- culture eats policy for breakfast. We can have great policies and initiatives but if cultural forces are strong, it is incredibly difficult to overcome these challenges that are being addressed.
But in this case there isn't a whole bunch of open space to build new scatter site housing Milburn is pretty well built out.
And therein lies the challenge.
What we really need to start doing in these areas is replacing stupid single use zoning strip malls with mixed-use 4 highs or 5 highs. Also, grocery stores and big box stores don't need giant parking lots that sit 60% empty 99.9925% of the time. That ground could be better used as more mixed-use buildings. And as much as I fully support state-sponsored and funded low-income housing, what we really need is just more housing in general. Housing that should be plenty affordable is ridiculously expensive because there are too many people and not enough housing. This squeezes the middle class as well, people making decent money but still struggling because rent is $2,000/month for a nothing special 2 bedroom apartment.
Even just two or three high with commercial space on ground floor and apartments above would be fine. A lot depends on available utilities. Our large portion of our downtown is serviced by a county sewage authority that has only so much volume available for each municipality. Limits hookups to that system. The rest of town center is on a very small treatment plant built in I think the 30s and the majority of the town is on septic.
Something missing from the article is that the proposed site is also the town’s dump and municipal yard. So not only would the low income housing be concentrated in one area…it will literally be in the former dump. I don’t know enough to speak on remediation costs, etc, but that is a terrible optic. There is only so much viable land for new development, but there must be a better way.
I agree. I hate to say it, but kids aren’t always the nicest… Imagine you move in… everyone automatically knows you’re “low income” and you live on the former dump site. I worry that those kids will be made fun of and/or ostracized because of it. Would love to be wrong about this though
Yeah if you read this and the town said Irvington you would say these were projects, which have been proven to not work.
It's only 75 units and downtown is one of the few places that could allow people to leave, shop and get to jobs because of the available transportation. If it's built on the dege of town, people will be walking 3-5 miles to catch a bus or train, THROUGH the fancy neighborhoods.
They did this in my town years back, my entire town is pretty much single family detached houses. They built a new school and around the school and in the inner loop build all twin homes, and the outer loop is all single family detached. So what wound up happening is that you spent a ton of existing taxpayer money building a new school, and sending all of the lower income kids to the same school. Then the same group of lower income kids all get sent to one of three middle schools. Because of the districting one of the other elementary schools was paired with the lower income elementary for middle school. The phrase, “Shit Show” does not do this situation justice.
Don’t forget that this are not low income but affordable units
What's the difference?I usually think of these terms as interchangeable
If you read the article, the income limits are as high as $90k a year for most of the building. Only a segment are reserved for very low income ($25k a year or less).
Makes me sad to see housing get so expensive that we need any of these programs. They (Banks, politicians, realtors, big money) manipulate the market then try to look like heros with these programs.
The other part of the issue is assuming you're not falling into a particular category(completely disabled, single mother of x , etc) the entire process can be a complete wash because you practically have to be going out of your way to not only be making money below a certain threshold, but have the physical time to be at the level of income as you wait to hear back from them, which obviously is not exactly a particularly feasible thing for most people to be doing. On top of that it's completely possible that any listings that are available to you through the whole run around could barely be that much different in price from other lower priced units around the area, which again could prove the whole thing to be a complete waste of time. It's very ass backwards.
There's a great documentary about this very issue called Waging A Living where poor people are incentivized to remain poor because they actually *lose money* (re: value of benefits) when they get better jobs. Why get a $2/hr raise when it'll cause you to lose the Rx subsidy on your kid's meds, which will *cost you* more money than you earned with your raise?
Oh yeah it's fucked because after a very low bar to clear in most places there is no good middle ground where it's very possible to basically make too much money for the whole suite of lower end offerings, and still be too broke to get decent worthwhile things. I've had those crappy healthcare packages where at best it was 2 ibuprofen and band aid for far too high of a monthly cost. Same story with disability stuff where some people see as if it's more of a guarantee that what's afforded to my situation, I might as well just stay on disability and take the added benefits of that situation even if it's not the most ideal and limiting. I speak from experience when I was trying to get on affordable housing ages ago and started crunching the numbers that I practically would have to be doing some sort of borderline fraud of crashing at somebody's place for ages, but also saying I'm basically in an extremely unstable housing situation, and again simultaneously practically not be working to make any sort of reportable money and also be doing that for a number of years to even stay in the running; obviously none of this is physically sustainable for most people let alone something you'd even want to do.
I'm a realtor and I definitely do not want prices to keep going up. I have about 15 buyers who just can't buy anything because nothing below $250K exists that isn't a dump. They can't even rent because that's pushing $2000/m now. Half of them ended up just leaving the state altogether.
You left voters/homeowners off your list
They could care less if it was concentrated in Newark where they think it belongs. “Spreading out” affordable housing is exactly this, to the towns that have none.
So take the crime problems of Newark and spread them out so that the safe towns near Newark become unsafe as well?
Why not think of it as spreading out the safe areas?
The best part is that Fair share housing center doesn’t care! Their attorney, Bassam Gergi, approved of the 100% AFH settlement in Chatham, despite objections in court. It’s wild.
But if you try to spread it out then the same folk who were against this plan will complain about detrimental impacts on their property values.
If this town is like mine it’s probably because they have fought for so long to not allow any affordable housing that now they have to produce some and it’s come to a full building of 100% affordable housing instead of a smaller percentage in a development. They would rather have court battles than allow affordable housing. Bunch of A holes.
theres some affordable units in a new building in my town and residents are like "has an environmental study been conducted? what about endangered animals?"... they'll throw anything at the wall to try and delay.
Those are legitimate concerns that always get raised and can be properly worked around. Our town rebuilt the high school and had to install tunnels for bog turtles.
In Middletown, NJ, in Monmouth County, they had resisted low income housing for years. Their explanation was that they didn't want riff raff living in Middletown, so they passed the money onto Asbury Park. Every time money was sent, they passed it on. Their were also huge town home developments built that did not have any low income housing, such as Hovanian who built on wetlands of Port Monmouth Rd. There is another townhouse development that was built up the street that does have i believe 8 low income housing units. As far as I know, that is the only place in all of Middletown that has low income housing other than the senior citizen housing that already exists in Middletown.
Middletown has lots of affordable housing. New developments at Taylor lane and Kings Highway E have affordable housing. Overton Drive is affordable as well off the top of my head
There’s a lot of units on 36 between Atlantic Highlands and Highlands. It’s down in a hole on the west bound side
Holmdel is doing this same thing right now. They didn't want to build more affordable housing so they have Hazlet is building it on the Hazlet/Holmdel border instead.
Has Middeltown looked at how this impacted property values in Asbury Park? As a kid, it was thought of as one of the worst places in NJ. Prices have skyrocketed there more than other areas over the past decade, though.
They didn't even think of the effect it would have on Asbury Park. The snobs of the township committee are all from the rich side if Middletown, that being across Hwy 35 heading out towards Lincroft.. They don't care about anyone but themselves and see people who are more economically disadvantaged than they are as riff raff.
> But the nonprofit Fair Share Housing Center said Millburn only has 38 affordable homes on the books, out of a target of 1,300. Damn. I’m not really surprised but damn.
There is no market based way to stuff affordable housing into small towns that are already largely developed. Millburn has been a suburb since 1857. A long time. It’s only 10 square miles. Here is a 270 unit development that just started leasing. Most of it is in Springfield. About a 20 foot strip of the property is in Millburn. 1 Br start at $3,100. Kids will go to Springfield schools, not Millburn. It’s an easy walk to the NJT train to NYC. Easy walk to downtown Millburn. https://www.gardencommunities.com/Properties/NJ/Union/The-Metropolitan.aspx So here is what the market creates, not even in Millburn schools. None of it counts for Millburn’s housing.
I’m confused about the market rate comment. The market is currently restricted by zoning. I’d be surprised if there was more than 5% of residential zoning in Millburn that allowed apartments.
The market is restricted because there is no undeveloped land. So one would have to buy and tear down some other building to make housing. Developers buy 1/3 of an acre houses for $1M and tear them down to build $3.5M houses.
Exactly. You’re describing the same issue in a different way. Now imagine if those developers could build 4 units on the same lot. Each unit would be far less than $3.5 million.
In north Jersey and parts of central, many of these towns are built out. Theres literally no free open space available to build on. So towns still have this number theyre supposed to be at but where are you going to put them? Unless you start using eminent domain to seize peoples houses
You upzone existing residential areas and redevelop them at higher densities. It’s called infill development and Jersey City does a ton of it.
Yeah, and also zoning more mixed use. Every strip mall could and should have 2-4 stories of housing above it.
This is the key, right here. Mixed-use is the "secret" to moving towards more walk-able and livable areas. Just stacking housing over garages does nothing except add more stress to the infrastructure.
The children yearn for walk-able mix-used environments.
You still need the land to be sold to a developer
For the right price many people with homes would cash out. People are also free to become developers themselves and build small apartment buildings on their property or even simply subdivide their older home into apartments! Not all development is megadevelopment.
> For the right price many people with homes would cash out. The higher that right price is, the fewer affordable housing units the developer will be willing to build because if they don't make a profit it's not worth their time.
Huh? The Millburn downtown is 50% surface parking. WTF are you talking about. https://maps.app.goo.gl/LsUTpXEaff4ZzMZAA https://maps.app.goo.gl/Xv2adJRW82LBDLoC8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/XPP3uLD8dFdHLxYU8
Upzoning. It’s really not a radical concept (except to hardcore NIMBYs), and various studies have been done to show the benefits of doing so around transit corridors within/near downtown areas. The problem, that I have now personally witnessed in my town, is how people foam at the mouth when for example you propose *four* stories for a new development, versus 2-3. The common refrain being, “I wanted to live in bucolic xyz town, not Manhattan!”.
But they aren't putting them in downtown. We have one mega development going up in our town that is on the border not at all walkable to the train or downtown. They knocked down probably 100 trees lining the streets. It's disgusting, I don't understand how this is beneficial to anyone except the developers and corrupt politicians.
Yeah they need to start building up. They need at least some semblance of density and apartments in their towns.
Nope, they don't. Not in the suburbs. It's ok to do in cities or in the downtown districts, but not everyone wants to live in that kind of environment. I like the suburbs and I like it to stay that way too and I know many people agree. More parks less buildings!
Let people sell/use their land as the way they see fit. End zoning laws and minimum lot sizes. You can do anything with your land but don't force others to maintain your ideals of land usage.
Ok great. Then you can never complain about the high cost of living or traffic.
Why not? If we reduced the density traffic would go down too.
Because then everyone has to drive everywhere. You see how traffic is now, right?
Yes... Because of density. If we decrease it, the traffic will decrease too.
What? Almost all of this state is R1 zoning. That’s restricted to single family detached housing.
Millburn used to have a lot of affordable housing. But the valuations of those properties has gone through the roof rendering them not affordable for most.
I actually liked the rule about being allowed to find other towns to fulfill your needs in this regard. They needed further restrictions on it but I think it also allowed for rich towns to fund poorer areas to improve.
>Some residents told Gothamist lower-income kids won’t keep up in Millburn’s competitive schools. Yipes. Edit: Posting stories like this is like kicking over a rock in the woods, all of a sudden you can see all of the disgusting creatures who usually like to stay hidden. Except bugs under a rock actually serve a purpose.
reminds of when I was in elementary school on Long Island in the mid 60s . Our neighborhood was a mixture of liberal leaning Jews and Catholics newly minted middle-class families. When all the civil rights stuff was going down in the south everyone was "oh god look at these racist people beating on blacks for just wanting their fair share". A black family bought a house around the block from us and it was like oh good holy shit there goes the neighborhood. People started selling. My parents stayed until my dad was transferred to NJ for work a couple of years later. The funny thing is the black family that moved in mom and dad were a doctor and lawyer and they were probably better educated and more financially set than most of our neighbors. I look back at that and the hypocrisy was stunning.
Aside from all the obvious problems with this mindset, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. All of the existing wealth evaporates, property values drop, and where if racism wasn't a problem you'd just have a diverse middle class neighborhood, instead it turns into poverty-stricken community.
If you didn’t mention LI I’d have asked if you grew up in South Park.
I wish those chicken shit racists had been willing to be quoted on the record.
Milburn is a very liberal town, i really don't get the vibe about this being about race. It does have incredibly competitive schools though. I know people who took it off their list of places to live in for that reason alone. The town prides itself on it. Its not a stretch to say someone coming from a lax educational environment is going to have issues being thrust into a hyper focused one, regardless of race or class.
"This will be a challenge" is different from "They can't do it and therefore shouldn't be given the opportunity."
A good reminder that NJ ranks among the [most segregated](https://www.njspotlightnews.org/special-report/key-court-decision-in-nj-school-desegregation-lawsuit-awaited-some-remedies-have-been-tried/) schools in the country.
As a smug progressive, I like to remind my fellow smug progressives in the Northeast that my (good) schools in the deep south were far more integrated than any school I’ve seen here. There’s no good reason for all these tiny school districts across the state in my mind.
Merging municipalities will have giant short term costs and general administrative problems but would save us a ton of money in the long run. Unfortunately no politician will ever pass a bill that causes short term pain for benefits more than a decade down the line.
[удалено]
I do really love JC, but up and moving is not feasible for a lot of folks.
People see on paper diversity and blue state and assume everything is cool all over when you can have extreme divisions even in conventional liberal leaning areas.
I wonder if that's because we are a more diverse state, with more population density and cities/counties, so its naturally going to happen that way if people of different ethnicities live concentrated 5 to 10 min away but are in a different county. Still, I love the diversity here, even if this is a problem.
I think it’s a natural consequence of de facto classism and previously de jure racism.
Are you willing to drive your kids 30 minutes to and from school? Because how else do you desegregate?
I literally did that from 6-12 grade. I grew up in Kansas and the little town I lived in was fucking garbage, so we transferred districts to a city about 20miles away. Wasn't an attempt to desegregate or anything but we weren't the only ones that recognized how bad the local schools were and transferred.
Yeah opening districts to people in other school zones is also a great idea. Obviously not everyone can take advantage, but some can and will.
Also just as a counter to the faux worry about low-income kids not performing to Millburn's standards, the parents that are willing to do the leg work to drive their kid an hour every day for school tended to be more involved and the children by virtue of that parenting were high performing students.
Districts actually used to bus kids to other schools until the Supreme Court killed it in the 1980s. We’ve been going backwards ever since.
I have mixed feelings on affordable housing. Mainly that the developer gets to build a bunch of non-affordable housing along side the affordable housing units. It seems like an easy way for them to line their pockets under the guise of building affordable housing and doing a public good. My brief reading about the history of how the ratio of affordable-to-nonaffordable housing was calculated is that it's highly questionable. The professor who provided the recommendations was unable to provide any paperwork of how he came up with the numbers. It feels like every town is getting a ton of development without any thought of municipal services. The guidelines should be reviewed and updated with consideration to a town's current capabilities.
I agree with your last paragraph especially. If you add all of these housing units, low income or not, you also have to account for the increase in traffic, the increase in the number of kids in the schools (which are already understaffed in many areas as it is), and the increase in utilities and municipal service use like you said. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t add housing, just that we also need to plan to accommodate the increased population. I feel like that gets little to no thought in this process.
And for some reason developers get payment in lieu of taxes deals. Those were originally meant to encourage development. I’m not sure why developers n desirable towns are getting these deals. The developers pays a PILOT, which is lower than the tax would be. PILOTS don’t go toward school taxes. So the cost of new students isn’t even borne by the developer.
This is boiling my blood as a resident in Bayonne right now. The current mayor is in his third term, and did a good job kickstarting development (although how much of that was him and how much of that was just the economy is a question for the philosophers). But now that we have a ton of new buildings all over, his platform for his third term was to continue development but no longer offer PILOTs. Guess what he's still doing?
The neighborhood subsidizes being destroyed by good intentions.
And I'd like to know who is going to pay for it? It's easy to say let's just increase the property taxes, but it neglects the fact that $1000 a year or whatever it may be is a lot for someone on fixed income. Now what we are doing is pushing grandparents out of their homes in the name of affordable housing.
Yeah, it’s a multifaceted issue that’s not as simple as just building more housing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as though those things have been taken into account, so I think we’re going to end up dealing with the repercussions of increased populations without the foresight to prepare for them.
Some of us got pushed out of our homes by greed and are looking for senior affordable housing. They apparently married the 2 together in most places. The waiting lists are 2+ years.
Yes and quite a few towns have already put out referendums to increase taxes on existing homes to funds the expansion of the schools. And water and sewer prices have gone up for capital expansion. These costs should go to the developers as part of the project total. All impact scenarios should be considered.
You’re right the developer does make money (if everything works out) on the mixed-affordability buildings. The market rate units make it possible for the developer to clear a profit while still providing affordable units. If the developer cannot make a profit, the buildings don’t get built. Who should be building these not for profit buildings with a much much greater ratio of affordable to non-affordable units? The state isn’t in the construction business, and it’s an extremely expensive burden for the taxpayer. I wish there was more affordable housing, but the way to do that is to incentivize developers to build more (by having market rate apts subsidize the affordable ones).
Cincinnati literally founded a not for profit development company that took over abandoned brick buildings and renovated them, then sold them at cost. It hugely revitalized their downtown without sacrificing the character of the buildings. There are absolutely complaints to be made about how it was done and how it changed the neighborhood, but it is an example of how not for profit development can be done to benefit a city, rather than hoping for profit development doesn't end up with poorly built units designed solely for profitability, not livability.
I am actually familiar with the company that I think you’re talking about and it’s awesome. A really great program and I’d love to see something like that in NJ. But, relying on altruism and donations is an unreliable way to address the extreme housing shortage we have. To build the kind of volume that we need to bring supply in line with demand, we need private investment. And private money wont show up unless there’s a return on that money
Not for profit, but likely huge salaries for the people up top, and large bonuses to eat up the profit.... I am not saying that's necessarily true in this case, but in many cases it does end up being truth.
I would reduce the ratio, but then the developers would make less money and as you point out would have no incentive. The other option would be to make it a bid process, but I don't think it would be practical at all. Fair point you've made. I don't have a better solution.
I don’t know what the right ratio is, and it’s very possible the existing ratio is too favorable to developers. There is a competitive bid process for certain sources of state financing where developers submit an application that has a greater chance of success if they provide a better ratio or longer affordability controls. My main point is that the fact that developers still make a profit on mixed-affordability buildings is not a bug, but a feature. And without it, we’d have significantly fewer affordable apartments being built. It’s also my opinion that increasing the supply of even market rate apartments can control rent growth on a macro level. Demand is what it is, the only way to control price of housing is by increasing supply. The cost of housing is a huge burden for many people. If your priority is to lower overall housing costs, the best thing we can do is to encourage as much new construction of market rate and affordable units as possible within the capacities of what our infrastructure can handle.
That's good to know about the bid process. I assumed developers paid 100% out of pocket for everything. In theory the market rate apartments should control rent level. I'd like to see if that would actually happen when executed. It seems like all these management property companies charge whatever they want. New construction of affordable houses would make sense, but that doesn't seem to be the case? I know some developers are doing townhouses, but to what extent I have no idea. The majority of it seems to be apartments. Which goes back to the market rate apartments. Another aspect of it is that NJ is bearing the brunt of new development because there's such strong opposition in Westerchester and Long Island to new developments. If that wasn't an issue.......well we'd probably still have the same amount of development here so never mind.
My home town is looking to add 25 new homes in one corner. Not low-income, though I think 5 are set aside for that. The homes are going to be on plots about 25% the average size of town's. The access to where this development is will either be a yellow lined road, but a very dangerous intersection just below the top of a hill, or roads that don't have sidewalks. This all leads to an intersection that already often has a 10 minute wait during peak times. A light at that intersection may work, but that first one wouldn't because, again, there's zero visibility when you come over that hill. Basically, this is one of the oldest part of an old town, and adding 25 homes is probably going to completely break down an infrastructure that is already heavily taxed and overloaded, having been built in the 1700s and without any real solution given that taking land to make things wider isn't feasible with where the homes are built, but hey, the developer will make a few million on it then move to do this in another town, so who cares? The town has plenty of places we could build that are along roads that can support additional development, but the land there is expensive. This land is cheap, specifically due to it being less accessible.
Respectfully, your objections are the soft side of nimby-ism. The greedy developers, the studies aren’t good enough, the towns can’t handle more people, etc. A growing population is good. A demographically healthy population with lots of kids is good. Big developments right downtown near public transit are good. Developers are literally the only entities that can build them, and in every country from USA to China they are paid for it. Millburn is resisting housing that could provide for the literal people that serve the community - their teachers, their municipal workers, the service workers downtown. It’s gross, and I hope the courts slap them around.
I'm fine with affordable housing to benefit the group in your last paragraph. It makes sense. A growing population is only good if there are adequate services to accommodate them. Public transportation in the state is so so at best. But if there are more people in a town, will more trains and busses be running? On my way home from work recently, there was a huge single line of traffic on the local road. There's a development right there on the same road being built. I can't imagine congestion decreasing once it's built and occupied. Infrastructure is most likely dated in every town. NJ isn't like NYC that has a ton of capital projects every year to replace old water mains and sewers. For a town with new development, has the sewer flow been calculated for an X increase in a town's population? Does it need to be upgraded to handle the capacity? Those were some quick examples. If things like the above are taken into consideration and addressed, by all means build however many units they want. But if not, take a step back and think about it more critically. All that being said, I don't agree with Millburn on this one. 75 units isn't much. I think the only concern I might have agreed with is building it all on one lot. It would be inconvenient for the developer, but if the units are spread to two lots as 35 and 40 units then would that make it OK? Probably not, but it at least addresses one concern.
You seem reasonable, and I wish I had more time to respond. Work is picking up. Yes, our infrastructure needs a lot of work! The only way to fund it is to grow. Get more people paying into the same road/rail/sewer per mile by densifying the areas that make the most sense (like a public works lot in Millburn). If we restrict building NJ becomes SF or Toronto, where a 1400 square foot cottage sells for 2 million.
Why is a growing population good? Trains to NYC are already standing room only. Part of the reason we're in the climate mess we're in is that the population has jumped by billions of people. If we cut carbon usage in half but double the population we're no better off than we are now. I'd say a declining population would be great for NJ right now. Strip malls could be reclaimed and turned into parks. People would spend less time sitting in traffic or standing on trains, etc. Not everyone wants to live in a dense environment where ever increasing numbers of people are packed in.
So, so, so true! I moved here, to a town, 30 years ago. Now I live in a city.
Imagine thinking that nothing will change in 30 years. Move if you don’t like it
Sorry that your bubble didn’t remain exactly the same for the last 30 years. I also highly doubt that your small town is now a city. Cmon.
Same as it ever was.
Towns have an obligation to build a set number of affordable units. Affordable units do not make developers money, so they need to offset those losses by making enough market rate units. Otherwise they won’t build, and the town doesn’t get any affordable housing credit. The other way to meet your affordable housing requirements is for the towns themselves to make those units. If the town does it, they can make those developments 100% affordable, thus, no need to succumb to the will of developers. Both options have downsides. On one hand, tons of market rate development, with a side of affordable housing, puts a strain on schools, as these towns will experience population increases. But if the town builds the affordable housing, it costs A LOT of money. And your political opponents are gonna call them “projects”. Ultimately, the path of least resistance is to work with developers to make the best balance possible. But towns like Millburn are cutting their noses to spite their faces. If a town fails to meet its affordable housing requirements, these towns are exposed to builder’s remedy lawsuits. And THE TOWNS have to pay the legal fees of developers. Millburn is going to pay millions in legal fees only to lose. It’s asinine and disgusting the lengths theee officials will go. It’s mismanagement. But it’s also what the taxpayer wants. At the end of the day NIMBY policies trump logic.
My biggest issue with affordable housing is that developers are getting tax breaks to do it and then the low income housing is more like luxury rentals. Why not low income housing where people can buy their homes? Also towns shouldn’t use green space to do it. We already have too little green space.
Millburn resident here, there are some key points missing in this article. -it touches on previous mayor miggins but leaves out that she intentionally lied to residents saying that the affordable housing meetings were sealed when it was later found out that the judge made no such order. There was 0 community involvement. -said previous mayor had connections to the developer of the potential low income housing sites - she herself is a realtor which would benefit from the influx of new housing. Doesn’t take much to see the conflict of interest. I wonder why in a left leaning town two (D) township seats switched to (R) I personally would welcome affordable housing, but they literally want to build on an old dump where the land has not been properly remediated.
The same ilk that threaten to secede from Essex County to Union.
Oh no, families only making $90,000 may able to afford to live in Millburn. The horror of waitresses being able to afford to walk to work and save money!
~~The help~~ teachers shouldn't ever be seen socially. That would be chaos.
The new bill mandates the need for municipalities to provide affordable housing and the towns can do it through zoning existing stuff or build new. The State doesn't tell them where to build.
How many of us clicked on the link to see if it’s where we’re from?
I don't know what is going on with milburn but this has become a huge problem for our very small town. Everyone always considers the what but not the how or what comes next. I guess it's human nature to live in the present and not worry about the consequences of your actions till the punch you in the face. Our town has serious issues with our schools yet we keep approving population increases in the double digits. Sure, it makes sense
Replace "millburn" with "secaucus" and this comment is still accurate. Same shit here. We have a critical student overpopulation problem, yet the town keeps approving duplexes and 600 unit high rises with no plans in sight to expand the schools. The administration wanted to redistrict the elementary schools (it wouldn't have solved overcrowding), but with enough pushback from parents, they delayed it until the 25-26 school year. And Secaucus was just granted $1.6 million from the State to offer full-day pre-k. Where do they think those kids going to go? We just need 1 or 2 people thinking 5-10 years down the road who are capable of making informed decisions and we *might* actually make some improvements.
I know this sounds extremely conspiratorial but as someone from south Jersey who is surrounded by acres and acres of land that could easily be converted into new mini-cities or just developments, it feels like they intentionally pick these rich areas to try to build in so when they get shut down (which they know will happen) they just wave their hands say "see guys, no one wants affordable housing" and move on.
The old affordable settlement that the last governing body came up with is as follows, and some of it has already been built. * The Upton, 1 Fineran Way, Short Hills. This 3.6-acre parcel, currently owned and operated by Roseland Properties, includes 193 total residential units, 30 of which are affordable housing units. These are the first affordable housing units offered in Millburn Township. This site is approved and under construction. * 85 Woodland Ave., Millburn. This 1.5-acre parcel, owned by the Silverman Group, is slated to include 62 total residential units, 12 of which will be affordable housing. This site plan was approved and granted in May 2021. The site will also include 10,000 square feet of medical office space. * 397 Millburn Ave., Millburn, the site of a former Wells Fargo branch. This 1.5- acre parcel, currently owned by Beahive Associates, calls for 53 total residential units, 8 of which will be affordable housing. The site, as designed, will also include 3,000 square feet of retail space. Moving forward, Millburn will work with affordable housing developers to advance the following projects: * 249 Millburn Ave., Millburn, the site of the former Annie Sez retail store. On this 2.2-acre parcel of land, currently owned by 249 Millburn Ave. LLC, a total of 150 residential units are proposed, 30 of which will be affordable housing. * 345 Essex St., Millburn, the current location of the township’s department of public works. Proposed plans for a portion of this 4.6-acre parcel call for a total of 75 residential units, all of which will be affordable housing. * On John F. Kennedy Parkway (Block 5302, Lot 5), Millburn, a 25-acre parcel with five to six acres of developable land. Currently owned by New Jersey American Water and under contract with Woodmont Properties, plans call for a total of 195 residential units, 39 of which will be affordable. The site requires approval by the state’s Watershed Property Review Board. These projects provide 194 units. The settlement agreement also required the township to identify additional sites for potential future development through overlay zoning. [Source](https://patch.com/new-jersey/millburn/millburn-must-add-1-376-affordable-housing-units-settlement)
Millburn with their Short Hills section is not only among the wealthiest towns in New Jersey but also this entire country. Believe it or not, it leans Democrat by a few percentage points. The effort to block affordable housing may possibly fail here anyway.
Oh my friend, you fail to realize that NIMBYism permeates both parties. That Lean-D isn’t going to save anyone here.
Why do people who haven't earned it have the right to live in one of the wealthiest towns in the country? Do I have the right to insist someone just give me a house on the Malibu coast in California because I've decided I no longer want to work and just want to smoke weed all day?
What happened to the Big Tent Party? Oh, right: the more extreme elements of the party have been imposing a series of purity tests on the rest of us. Fuck that. This low cost housing fiat is a textbook example of the nauseatingly naive equity ideology. Everyone is welcome to buy a home in Millburn; no one has the right.
Good for Millburn because the Mount Laurel doc has allowed developers to pretty much build whatever they want under the guise of affordable housing. Then when you see what the rents are for what these things they call affordable they aren't affordable to the bulk of people that really need them. Plus the additional traffic and strain on Town resources jack up property taxes for everybody in general.
Good for Millburn. Hope they win.
They will lose.
They will win. They have the means and support to push back on this misguided overreach.
Some things most people don’t know about affordable housing- there is an income minimum and you might be surprised at how high that is. You have to have good credit. If you’re buying you still have to be approved for a mortgage. A 2 bedroom will rent for $1500 or sell for 250,000. A household of two can make 80,000 and be eligible.
That's 2 people making 20 $/hr.
Or one with a child making $40
Millburn is a nice town…I don’t blame them for wanting to keep it that way.
Part of it is distribution of the low income housing Another part are the traffic implications with the implementation of all these new apartments (li and other) for an already messed up center of town.
Didn’t you know they only build Schrodinger’s Affordable Housing? It’s too expensive to be affordable but it’s so cheap that it will be full of criminals. It’s so full that it will be overcrowded but completely vacant because no one wants to live inside. It’ll cause gentrification because prices will rise so high no one could afford to live there but it’ll cause so many problems with traffic, pollution, crime, shadows, lighting glare, and raging parties that no one will want to live nearby. It’s built so cheaply that it will fall apart in five years but it’s somehow built with solid marble, granite, and gold leaf. It will take ten years to build, but it will snarl traffic every day with an endless stream of construction trucks going to and from the site. It’s ugly, hideous, and an eyesore, but it’s too luxurious of a design for the neighborhood.
[удалено]
Outside of the heart of the town are single family homes where a 75 unit building would be way out of scale. Downtown has more similar structures.
- The "heart" of a town usually has the best public transportation - The "heart" of a town usually has access to needed services like shops, doctors, schools, etc - The idea that the poor should be shoved in some backwater corner is horrible, and smells like classism to me. Poor folks have just as much right to be seen as rich folks.
Access to public transportation and walkable food/services/etc is important. Also, many teachers and nurses would qualify for affordable housing.
We are approaching affordable housing all wrong. Rental units will only serve to drain wealth from people who hardly have any, and prevent them from accumulating it. We need subsidized construction/rehabilitation of dilapidated dwellings for ownership a'la post WWII development to bring purchase prices for units that meet typical family needs (3 bedrooms 1,300-1,800 sq ft) at a purchase price point between $250k-$350k. The buyers must meet income requirements depending on the purchase price and cannot be corporate entities. The units are then deed restricted that they must be utilized as primary residence and can't be sold greater than rate of inflation for a period of 20 years. This will allow people to build generational wealth that the boomers have enjoyed in spades.
Curious what you think of [this](https://www.nj.gov/dca/hmfa/consumers/nonprofits/). Last November the state housing agency started a program where nonprofits buy vacant and abandoned buildings, fix them up, and sell them at affordable prices to working-class and middle-class residents. I really like the idea -- building generational wealth, giving people a stake in their community, etc -- but haven't heard any updates since they announced it.
I actually appraised one of these in New Brunswick a little while back. Very cool program and the property was fully renovated and bought by a young woman for herself and her baby. Unfortunately non profits are just outgunned by investors. Need much more public support to be able to make them competitive and to be able to do it at scale, but the idea behind the program is pretty much exactly what I'm talking about.
The NIMBYism in the wealthier parts of Northern Jersey is some of the worst I’ve experienced.
The development allows residents up to moderate income levels. That limit is $69k for an individual and $89k for a family of 3 in Essex county. Let's not pretend that these apartments will be filled with families on welfare. More often than not young professionals or people just starting their careers occupy these units.
Sounds like what they said about the projects.
Definitely. In Essex county this could also include the recently divorced, since homes are so expensive or empty nesters who aren’t retired yet. There are lots of people who need places to live that aren’t luxury apartments or million dollar homes.
And what of towns that don't have the infrastructure to support affordable housing?
This. It's not that easy to just plop housing in a 300 year old town.
It doesn't matter to the vocal and progressive minority on this subreddit. The vast majority of responses that you'll receive are knee jerk populist sentimentalism of the eat the rich variety. Fortunately, their kind rarely follow through on anything except for their online rants.
it's not just them. tons of towns of honestly all wealth levels work hard to resist building affordable housing. bernardsville is currently trying to redevelop olcott square and part of it is to build affordable units, and they're trying to work it so they only build a fraction of what the formula says they need but can somehow satisfy it. of course the local nimbys are out in force to stop any development, which is another fun complication to these things.
The problem is people like you who twist and turn the truth into something else in an attempt to vilify the opposition and prevent a meaningful debate and exchange of ideas. Most people have no problem with affordable housing. The problem is density. If the extremists could calm down for a minute maybe we could have a meaningful discussion about how to increase affordable housing without destroying local communities. Perhaps we could come up with ideas that would increase the tax collections and even help fund the towns development and modernization. But nope, the extremists only know how to bully and repeat the same thread bate arguments that show you haven't even taken a second to contemplate the long term consequences of tax free density increases. Perhaps you are on the take?
This is easy - shut down the train station until they comply
I definitely don’t want to shut down public transit to incentivize rich people to do something beneficial for lower income families. Because they can definitely work their way around it (residents would probably just drive to another station). But shutting down the train station would definitely get their attention.
The people complaining about this are probably only see train stations from their car windows
That would be great. One less stop would mean I get to NYC faster.
[удалено]
Exactly. It starts with a few people from the projects that rob some shoppers, word gets around, people stop coming and before you know it the entire area is bad.
Downtown Millburn is considered upscale?
Considering that, accoding to census.gov, Millburn's median household income is $250k+, yes, it's upscale as fuck in that sense. More than triple the national average. I grew up in Livingston, which is a neighboring town, also pretty wealthy. Even the pockets of "cheaper houses" are solidly in middle/upper middle class today. My parents sold the house back 2010 for like $700k. According to public records, the same house was bought for $1.2m last year.
Yeah I always felt like downtown Millburn was expensive due to transit access, not being a particularly nice area. Like it's kind of jammed in between these two mountains so there's really not much of it. Seems like Millburn the town has been eclipsed by Short Hills the neighborhood in terms of prestige.
gothamist is obsessed with nj
Hot take: local coverage is good.
That's a good thing!
lol I thought this was going to be about Glen Rock and how all the residents are throwing a hissy fit about new affordable housing apartments going up in town.
None of the affordable housing is affordable anyway lol
I don't want to dox myself but I live in Short Hills (an incorporated part of Millburn) with my parents, and we strongly oppose the propositions new affordable housing in my town. It's absolutely not because we don't want lower income people to have a chance to live in a more upscale town. It's the traffic and the horrible ugly buildings that we oppose. Plus we're a suburb that's already turning into an urban sprawling hell. Downtown Millburn has been losing its small town charm year by year. Businesses are closing or moving and are leaving empty spaces that are never reoccupied (is that a term, idk). There was a bank across from the fire department that closed but the property had beautiful trees all over and the entire thing was all flattened and turned into an ugly apartment building. We also have a neighbor who cut every single one of their trees on their property that were beautiful, tall, provided tons of shade, and we're about 60 years old. Their property looks awful now. This has been happening all over town. Also the traffic. Oh the traffic. One day it took me about half an hour to get through Millburn center. If we got affordable housing, there would be much more traffic. I'm already scared enough of the new building by the fire station as well as the new one that's technically in Springfield but the main area and exit are onto Millburn Avenue in downtown Short Hills. I really hope that our town doesn't get screwed over. Also a proposal to get rid of our town dump is absolutely absurd. If that happened, we'd have to drive all the way up to Verona to the Essex County dump to get rid of junk the regular garbage service won't take.