In 1975, New Jersey’s Supreme Court ordered every town in the state to make way for multifamily housing. It’s been a long journey.
Image credit: Xinmei Liu
In the late 1960s, Ethel Lawrence and her husband lived with their children in a two-story house on an acre of land in Mount Laurel, N.J. Her family had lived in the township for generations, and she wanted her children to be able to live there, too. But the area was changing, fast.
The township, near Philadelphia, had been home to Black families like the Lawrences since before the Civil War, when it was a stop on the underground railroad. Then, in the decades after World War II, the federal government financed the construction of highways and tracts of single-family homes. White families fleeing cities like Camden, N.J., and Philadelphia tripled Mount Laurel’s population between 1950 and 1970.
When the township sought to condemn an area of dilapidated homes, where some of the town’s Black residents lived, Ms. Lawrence jumped into action. She and her husband owned their home, but Ms. Lawrence was concerned that other Black or Latino residents would be forced out. With a local minister and a community group, she came up with a plan to build 36 new affordable units, even securing $35,000 in state grants to study it. But there was a big hurdle: Mount Laurel’s planning board said the project wasn’t allowed under its zoning code.
Ethel Lawrence, seen in an undated photo, worked with other activists to prompt sweeping changes to affordable-housing policy in New Jersey. Photo Credit…Lawrence Family
Ms. Lawrence was furious. She and other Mount Laurel activists connected with young lawyers from Camden Legal Services who were looking for a test case to address what they saw as de facto segregation in zoning codes. They filed a lawsuit against the township in 1971, and Ms. Lawrence — a church pianist, Girl Scout leader, mother of nine and tireless activist — became the lead plaintiff in a suit that would eventually alter the state’s housing landscape.
In 1975, the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of Ms. Lawrence and the other plaintiffs. It said that Mount Laurel had to change, but the decision went much further, interpreting the state’s constitution to require each of New Jersey’s 564 municipalities to build their fair share of affordable housing.
That ruling was the opening salvo in decades of lawsuits and appeals. For years, municipalities balked at fulfilling their obligations, claiming new multifamily housing would change the character of their towns or cause traffic or incur costs they were unable to handle. They went to court to fight development. But over the following decades, state law and court decisions reaffirmed what has come to be called the Mount Laurel doctrine. Most recently, on March 20, Gov. Phil Murphy signed a law codifying certain Mount Laurel rules and streamlining the process of defining each region’s affordable-housing obligations.
The Mount Laurel decisions did not prevent New Jersey from experiencing the affordable-housing crisis, which now touches every corner of the country. (By one estimate, the state needs 214,000 units for the lowest-income renters.) Nonetheless, those court decisions have led to the development of more than 70,000 units of affordable housing in New Jersey since 1980, according to the Fair Share Housing Center, which helps monitor compliance with housing laws.
“If Mount Laurel didn’t exist, the vast majority of the housing would not have been built,” Adam Gordon, the executive director of Fair Share Housing, said.
The Mount Laurel doctrine “has been a success,” said Vicki Been, the faculty director at the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University. “A rocky and very time-consuming success.”
Why it took 25 years for one town to build 54 units
The long reach of Ms. Lawrence’s activism — and the struggle to achieve its promise — can be seen in the apartment occupied by Racheal McDaniel and her family. In 2022, Ms. McDaniel and her three children moved into a new housing development in Cherry Hill, an affluent New Jersey suburb known for its tree-filled subdivisions and good schools.
The complex, called the Evans-Francis Estates, consists of two-story townhouses with blue clapboard siding and bright white trim. All of the units are reserved for people who earn less than 80 percent of the area’s median income, and several are set aside for people who are emerging from homelessness. Ms. McDaniel, who had been staying with her children in a homeless shelter, got one of the 54 units.
It’s a modest complex. And it took 25 years to build.
In 2001, five years after the project was proposed, the township approved it. But then, single-family homeowners living nearby sued the nonprofit developer and the planning board. The lawsuits went on for years. (The homeowners lost, twice.) A township objection to an easement went all the way to the appellate court. (The township lost.) In 2009, Cherry Hill’s planning board said the original approval had lapsed and made the developer of Evans-Francis reapply.
At that point, complaints about Evans-Francis focused on things like traffic or proper egress, but Mr. Gordon, of Fair Share Housing, suggests that in Cherry Hill and other communities, homeowners’ real anxiety was because of the nonwhite and less wealthy residents moving to town. He remembers a planning-board meeting in 2010 during which a homeowner said, “We don’t want buses arriving of people from Camden,” a city that is largely Black and Latino. There were more delays, adjournments and reschedulings until, in 2013, a judge ruled that construction could move forward. When everything seemed ready to go, there was a tax dispute. Evans-Francis was finished in 2021, shortly before Ms. McDaniel moved in.
While the plan for Evans-Francis was being considered, the Mount Laurel doctrine continued to evolve statewide. A “builder’s remedy” allowed developers to sue towns when they rejected affordable developments. In 2015, the state’s Supreme Court got rid of a state oversight agency and replaced it with a new system in which lower courts had dedicated Mount Laurel judges who oversaw the municipal housing plans. Fair Share Housing, the affordable-housing advocacy group, also got an official role. Since 2015, 20,000 affordable units, or a third of the total units required by the Mount Laurel rules, have been built.
As Mount Laurel has evolved, “it’s not just an empty threat,” said Tram Hoang, a senior housing associate at PolicyLink, a nonprofit that works on progressive causes nationwide. “It’s a framework that has advocacy institutions that are ready to use it.”
Other states are trying similar measures to force suburbs to build affordable housing. Last year, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York introduced a modest plan that appeared partially modeled on Mount Laurel, but suburban lawmakers quashed it. California has a system for determining affordable-housing needs, but it hasn’t resulted in a lot of actual construction. Other states like Connecticut and Massachusetts also have laws that allow developers to sue to build affordable housing, but without Mount Laurel’s rigorous system of setting a number of units for each town.
Tracee Battis, the executive director of Project Freedom, a nonprofit that develops affordable housing, said her organization had built 288 disability-accessible rental apartments across New Jersey since the court’s 2015 decision. In each instance, towns gave land to Project Freedom, and money came from affordable-housing funds at the state, city and federal levels. She said the developments were in higher-income areas than they were before, meaning that children living in Project Freedom housing were able to attend better-funded schools. “So it’s kind of worked for all of us,” Ms. Battis said of the 2015 decision.
As for Evans-Francis, the complex has integrated easily into Cherry Hill, defying the dire predictions. “Residents have not complained at all,” Cosmas Diamantis, the director of community development at Cherry Hill Township, said. The anger from neighbors and homeowners has dissipated, and opponents of the project in town government have left their positions.
“It’s something we showcase to anyone that’s interested,” Mr. Diamantis said. “And it’s certainly an example of how 100 percent affordable-housing projects can be built successfully.”
Adjusting to the suburbs
The state Supreme Court ruling in 1975 addressed economic, not racial, segregation. But for Ms. Lawrence and the other plaintiffs in the original Mount Laurel suit, racial integration of the suburbs had always been a goal. Progress in that realm, too, has been slow; as of 2017, New Jersey schools were still among the most segregated in the nation.
About 7 percent of Cherry Hill’s 77,000 residents are Black, including Ms. McDaniel and Sharondica Forester, who also lives in Evans-Francis. Ms. Forester, 42, learned about the building from a cousin who chanced to see it under construction while driving through Cherry Hill. Ms. Forester, who had moved out of what she described as an unsafe neighborhood in Jersey City, applied for and received a unit. Because of a housing voucher, she’s able to pay $660 for the apartment, whose total rent is $2,200.
The adjustment has not been perfect; her eldest daughter, 15, is not used to the quiet, and she says her two younger children, ages 11 and 6, have nowhere to play. She doesn’t have a driver’s license and takes ride shares to and from her job at the Cherry Hill post office, which costs hundreds of dollars each week. And the after-school programs she wants to enroll her children in cost more than what she can afford, an issue she didn’t have in Jersey City. Yet overall, she finds the neighborhood a step up from her old one.
“I can feel safer. I don’t have to worry about getting a phone call or anything about my kids getting shot or something,” Ms. Forester said.
Ms. McDaniel, who is a part-time paralegal, is pleased with her situation. Her place has two bedrooms and three bathrooms. She’s happy with the local school, and her children — ages 6, 3 and 1 — like to play on the patio. “I have chalk out there for them, and they color all over,” she said. The place offers a sense of normalcy they had not had in a long time.
The progress toward more affordable housing came too late for Catherine Grooms, Ms. Lawrence’s first cousin. Now 85, Ms. Grooms moved out of Mount Laurel township in the 1970s because her rental housing was dilapidated and set to be condemned. She couldn’t find anything affordable in the town where she was raised and where she has fond memories of ice-skating, eating large family dinners and attending Jacob’s Chapel. “I loved Mount Laurel,” she said.
Although most of her extended family left the town, Ms. Grooms said her cousin, who died from cancer in 1994, would be proud of what’s been built.
That includes Ethel R. Lawrence Homes, an affordable-housing complex, in Mount Laurel. Ms. Grooms’s granddaughter and great-granddaughter live there. Ms. Lawrence’s mission of preserving her family’s place in town has been fulfilled.
– Roshan Abraham
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