Affordable Housing Lawsuit Against Murphy Suppoted By Chatham

CHATHAM, NJ — Chatham Township has joined a lawsuit filed by 12 other municipalities against Governor Phil Murphy for failing to appoint members to the Council on Affordable Housing (COAH).

The lawsuit seeks to compel the governor to re-establish New Jersey's Council on Affordable Housing (COAH). The towns argue in the lawsuit that the Murphy administration has failed to appoint members to the COAH Board, which is a violation of the Fair Housing Act.

"The Township of Chatham is no different from other municipalities in New Jersey insofar as it has spent a lot of time and money on an affordable housing process that is broken," Chatham Township Mayor Ashley Felice said.

Chatham and the other 12 towns are requesting that the governor reconstitute COAH in order to restore the regulatory safeguards established by the legislature through the Fair Housing Act to protect municipalities from "run-away development."

According to Cranford Mayor Kathleen Miller Prunty, Chatham and nine other municipalities sent a letter to the Governor earlier this summer "imploring him to get our laws and process back on track by appointing members to the COAH Board."

"Current procedures erode a municipality’s ability to comply as it deems fit and do so in a cumbersome, unspecialized and costly process, which is the exact opposite of what the Fair Housing Act requires," Felice said.

The lawsuit cites the Mt. Laurel doctrine, which was established nearly 50 years ago and prohibits New Jersey towns from enacting zoning laws that prevent the development of affordable housing.

Many towns resisted, and real estate developers across the state began using the Mr. Laurel doctrine to file "Builders Remedy" lawsuits to invalidate municipal zoning rules in order to allow large, multi-family developments that were in conflict with municipalities' master plans.

The New Jersey Legislature later adopted the Fair Housing Act in 1984 and created the COAH — a bipartisan agency of members representing different interest groups — in order to prevent courts from becoming the forum for resolving these land use issues.

Governor Chris Christie attempted to abolish COAH in 2013 and no new appointments have been made to the board since that time. But the New Jersey Supreme Court deemed that this attempt exceeded his authority and that it was unlawful.

"Governor Murphy has an opportunity to right this wrong by reconstituting the COAH board," Prunty said. "The failure to comply with the Fair Housing Act again puts Cranford and New Jersey municipalities at the mercy of a court system being exploited by real estate developers pressing for over-sized developments without regard to community impact — exactly what the Legislature intended to prevent by passing the Fair Housing Act."

The township claims that without COAH to regulate the development of affordable housing, towns will face the proposal of mega-projects.

"We believe that the Governor should follow the law and appoint people to COAH so they can properly balance all the public interests in the manner in which the Legislature prescribed," Felice said.

The full list of towns that signed the lawsuit can be found below:

• Beach Haven
• Bordentown
• Chatham
• Cranford
• East Hanover
• Egg Harbor
• Fairfield
• Freehold
• Jackson
• Mahwah
• Montvale
• Readington
• Sayreville