CHERRY HILL, NJ—Observers of the battle over affordable housing in New Jersey say it's not likely that either the Christie Administration or the state legislature will take advantage of the 90-day time-out the Supreme Court gave to its own decision throwing the matter back into the court system. Gridlock over state budget shortfalls and worries about their reelection campaigns are likely to distract lawmakers from taking any action on the matter.

Since the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in mid-March that affordable housing advocates could go back to court to challenge exclusionary municipal zoning laws, GlobeSt.com has been collecting reaction from a range of observers who have watched the Garden State's affordable housing market lurch from legal challenge to legal challenge.  

The Court described as “moribund” the state's Council on Affordable Housing, or COAH, which failed to meet at least three court-mandated deadlines to produce a regulatory process for approving such housing.

Most of those interviewed by GlobeSt.com say it's likely that the Court order will stand, even though the decision included a 90-day waiting period to give the state one last chance to fix the issue with legislation. Unless mayors of affected municipalities pressure legislators to act quickly, affordable housing issues will move back to the courts.

“Too many New Jersey municipalities exclude people who work in the stores and diners of New Jersey,” says attorney Kevin D. Walsh, who argued the Supreme Court case for the Fair Share Housing Center, based in Cherry Hill, NJ. “We now have a way to make sure they are not excluded and to ensure there are fair housing opportunities for people who are forced to live far from their jobs and families and who have been displaced by Superstorm Sandy. The Court properly responded to the failure of the state government to implement the law.”

“The  New Jersey Supreme Court decision stripping COAH of its power in the affordable housing process and transferring it back to the courts is a sad, but necessary, moment for New Jersey,” says Peter Reinart, director of the Kislak Real Estate Institute at Monmouth University, West Long Branch.  “For over ten years, the process for providing affordable housing opportunities has been mired in the failure of COAH to abide by the constitutional requirements and the delays caused by litigation in attempting to force COAH to act properly. This decision will result in more litigation, but this time the judicial decisions on a town by town basis will result in enforceable plans to create affordable housing.”

“This has been going on for a long, long time,” says Lori Grifa, a real estate and public affairs law partner in the Hackensack office of the Haddonfield-based Archer & Greiner law firm. “The place where you'll see movement, to the extent that you see any movement, it's going to be driven by the mayors.”

There is no appetite to rush through any response to the court's order at the state level for several reasons, says Grifa, who served as commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs in the Christie Administration and chaired COAH. Grifa says the state's persistent financial crisis has the executive branch completely preoccupied, and the entire state legislature is up for re-election this year.

“It is not the pattern in an election cycle for them to come back and sit in regular Monday and Thursday sessions. The only way that there's a deviation from the typical pattern is if the mayors buttonhole their legislators and say, 'listen, we're at risk here, you need to knuckle down and produce a fix.'”