July 20th, 2009, Subject: Support warranted for COAH housing
Middletown Township Committeemen Patrick
Short and Sean Byrnes are to be commended for their vote against a
resolution supporting the abolition of the Council on Affordable
Housing. They recognize that providing housing choices to households of
all incomes in each municipality is not only the right thing to do, it
is also the law in New Jersey.
The majority of New Jerseyans work hard to provide
the necessities for their families, including safe, affordable homes.
According to a report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a
New Jersey family needs to earn at least $23.12 an hour to afford a
two-bedroom apartment at fair market rates. Yet the mean wage of a New
Jersey renter is $17.26, leaving more than half of the state's renters
unable to afford a two-bedroom unit at a fair market price. Because of
higher housing costs in Monmouth County, the wage required is more -
about $24 an hour.
Despite recent partisan rhetoric, COAH provides the
only voluntary process for municipalities to satisfy their
constitutional requirement to provide adequate housing to all segments
of our population. Municipalities can opt out of the COAH process, at
which point developers can assume primary responsibility for providing
a mix of market rate and COAH housing with limited control by those
towns.
Inclusionary developments, with the appropriate mix
of market rate and COAH units, typically do not cost the taxpayer
anything to build. The developer is compensated for the cost of the
low- and moderate-income units by a modest increase in the allowable
density. In other cases, affordable housing units are constructed by
nonprofits using state, county and federal construction funds. New
Jersey law prohibits the burden being placed on the local taxpayers'
backs.
BEVERLY BOVA SCARANO
Middletown