Don't pit affordable hsg. against the environment

Everyone knows it's expensive to live in New Jersey and that housing costs are "through the roof."

For over 20 years, our state has been trying to provide affordable housing. It's an important public goal, one that we ought to be able to figure out. Unfortunately, new rules put out by New Jersey's Council on Affordable Housing will pit housing needs against clean water, open space and other environmental quality needs of our citizens!

Meeting the need for affordable housing doesn't have to mean more sprawl, or come at the expense of our water supply, parks, open lands and natural amenities.

New Jersey's Supreme Court, in its Mount Laurel decisions, ruled that every municipality must provide a realistic opportunity through local zoning to accommodate its fair share of low- and moderate-income housing. The state's Fair Housing Act of 1985 established the Council onAffordable Housing (commonly known as COAH) to calculate housing need, assign affordable housing

obligations and make sure local governments meet those obligations.

One of the main tools has been "inclusionary" development - - requiring low- andmoderate income homes to be built as part of larger, market-rate housing developments. In effect, the sale of market-rate housing subsidizes the affordable homes.

Over time, this method of providing affordable homes has resulted in thousands of units of market-rate housing being built in rural communities, often on farmland and environmentally sensitive lands. The small percentage of affordable units that have been built are often far from jobs and public transportation.

Now the proposed COAH rules call for more than 115,000 new affordable housing units across the state. If inclusionary development remains the primary way to reach this goal - with four to five new market-priced homes allowed for each affordable unit - a total of almost 700,000 new homes will be required by 2018!

Where would we put all this inclusionary development? COAH's proposed rules stubbornly refuse to recognize many factors affecting public health, safety and welfare, and have targeted more farmland and open spaces for development.

For starters, COAH's estimate of the state's "vacant, developable" land is severely flawed. In addition to making blatant errors like including airport runways, highway medians, backyards and even the Picatinny Arsenal (owned by the federal Department of Defense), the rules completely disregard local ordinances that limit development in order to protect water supply and quality, environmental health and community character.

The proposed rules are also not well integrated with other significant, legislatively mandated plans, including the State Plan and the Pinelands Comprehensive Management Plan. The very existence of the Highlands Regional Master Plan is ignored. A lack of coordination with these plans is a recipe for disaster.

The COAH rules guide affordable units into the State Plan's designated growth areas: Planning Area 1 (urban) or Planning Area 2 (suburban), population centers and existing sewer service areas. However, the Department of Environmental Protection is now revising and shrinking sewer service areas because they are decades out of date and not in compliance with current environmental standards.

Allowing thousands of new housing units in these old sewer service areas would mean even more sprawl in rural and environmentally-sensitive areas.

To make matters worse, the proposed rules cap the amount of future open space and recreation land that can be excluded from the developable area, limiting towns to having, at most, 6 percent of their total acreage as parks and recreation areas. Municipalities' ability to preserve farmland, open space and parks for their communities would be severely hampered and the result would be a distinctly urban landscape.

As we learn more and more about the many benefits of open space- as individual as fostering better health, as critical as protecting our water supply and as universal asmitigating global climate change - these proposed rules ignore today's realities.

Instead, COAH should encourage affordable housing to be provided through redevelopment in areas where infrastructure, jobs and public transportation are available, and offer incentives for building affordable housing without the addition of market-rate units. Rehabilitation and buy-downs of existing housing should also provide a larger share of the state's affordable housing need.

New Jerseyans are fed up with suburban sprawl and continue to vote for preserving our forests, farmland and open space. But most folks also understand and appreciate the need for affordable housing in this very expensive state we're in. A more carefully thought- out set of rules would prevent these from becoming mutually exclusive goals.

You can learnmore about the proposed COAH rule at www.state.nj.us/dca/coah/.

Michele S. Byers is executive director of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, Far Hills.