Posted by Matt Rooney On January 25, 2017
If you missed last week’s affordable housing decision from the N.J. Supreme Court, Save Jerseyans, then get caught up ASAP right here.
The bottom line?
New Jersey communities face NEW property tax-busting affordable housing requirements, as many as 150,000 unit state-wide; the numbers are being fought-out in a number of trial level venues as we speak.
Some of you have asked me what this could look like on a town-by-town basis.
Not pretty, that’s for damn sure, but our friend Assemblywoman Holly Schepisi (R-39) shared one pro-affordable housing organization’s projections via social media this morning to illustrate the challenge ahead for New Jersey’s municipalities.
Brace yourselves:
https://savejersey.com/2017/01/affordable-housing-units-bergen-county-new-jersey/
Given the population decrease in NJ due to people seeking greener pastures (or just a job or lower property taxes) elsewhere, perhaps the answer is not to build additional housing units in Ridgewood to help us meet our COACH obligations, but to find some way to force the price or market valuation of the entire existing housing stock in Ridgewood down far enough in value as athat a sufficient number of previously built single family homes in Ridgewood end up falling into the affordable housing category. Why try to build up (because there is no actual room to build out) when you can simply drag down? Perhaps there would be some difficulty in forcing the unfortunate existing owners to sell but, hey, this is New Jersey…we’ll just intimidate them, Soprano’s style, until they see the wisdom of the policy. /s
Route 17 and Route 4 municipalities Edgewater, Englewood, Lyndhurst, Paramus, Mawah, Ramsey are all said to be on the hook for the maximum obligation–one thousand affordable housing units. Ridgewood? A measly 900 units. What’s the deal? It seems as if the owner of the Garden State Plaza must be bribing the New Jersey judiciary–BIGLY.
Build a crappy section on a few blocks and they will come?.im sure the local taxpayers would love that rezoning to shanty town levels
Can someone explain to me how is it calculated that a certain town needs a certain number of units? If Ridgewood is on the hook for 900 units what is the criteria for distributing them to the incoming owners? How sure is it that 900 units will be occupied? Where are these 900 low income families living right now, under bridges, in the open air? In other words how do they know that there is a need for this number of units? What percentage is allocated to minorities, veterans, retirees etc? Is there any legal ways to stop this madness?
Valley + affordable housing will ruin Ridgewood and HoHoKus. Bad idea to buy here.
10:10 good points. The.only manageable solution for the boomers who have schooled out their kids is to call 1800 the moving guys with trucks heading south,Place is becoming a town of raggy angry townsfolk Its like the Hitchcock movie the Birds..neighbor on neighbors throats to avoid the real management issues here in bergen and Ridgewood commons.which is poor management, uncontrolled spending ahead on functional libraries and Union codling…Roads are shit and cars are getting ruined by gladiator
Driving. They can’t even fill the winter potholes on the main streets without some happy together website cue up process
@11.36. Yep, what’s up with the streets? How can a rich village with such high tax rates have such terrible streets? Having well paved streets is a minimum. It helps in so many ways from a better and uniformed look to better driving and ALSO to reduced noise. I look all over Ridgewood and HHK and see the same shity streets. Not to mention county roads such as Franklin, Maple etc. Terrible. Is it so difficult for our VC to speak to county and coordinate with them? Imagine the village in freshly paved streets, just beautiful. Instead our VC discusses library renovations $$$$.