Abstract
The Mt. Laurel saga is one of the most gripping in the history of American land use law and politics. It has been the subject of numerous legal decisions, many articles, and two books. After forty-three years since the community of Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, was sued for discrimination against poor and African American residents through its zoning practices, the results remain contentious and the subject of legal and political debate. It has been the subject of several landmark decisions by the New Jersey Supreme Court, the most famous of which made exclusionary zoning a violation of the state’s constitution and imposed a “fair share” obligation for affordable housing on many of the state’s communities. The creation of a state agency to determine and assign municipal quotas to implement the court’s decisions has been strongly opposed by many suburban politicians and current New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who has unsuccessfully (so far) attempted to abolish this agency.
The genesis of this saga was the attempt of long term African American residents of the then largely rural and mostly white community of Mt. Laurel to build a small housing project. This occasioned impassioned opposition, leading to a lawsuit to overturn the town’s zoning and to also open up growing communities at the edge of metropolitan areas to racial minorities. The lawsuit was aimed in part to allow low-income black and Hispanic residents of the increasingly desperately poor deindustrialized city of Camden to gain access to improved housing, neighborhoods, schools, and jobs in growing exurban communities like Mt. Laurel. The story of this struggle has been told in Our Town: Race, Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia (Kirp, Dwyer, and Rosenthal 1995).
Despite the initial New Jersey Supreme Court ruling in 1975 overturning Mt. Laurel’s zoning and its 1983 decision providing in great detail just how compliance by communities like Mt. Laurel that had tried to circumvent its earlier decision would be enforced, the low-income housing originally proposed in 1970 was not finally opened until 2000 (with additional units added in 2004). Named for its foremost advocate (by then deceased), the Ethel Lawrence 140-unit town homes project was designed not only to house low-income residents from the region but also to overcome stereotypes typically raised by opponents of subsidized, “affordable” housing: increased crime and taxes and a decline in the property values of neighboring homeowners.
In this volume, Princeton University sociologist Douglas Massey and his colleagues aim to dispel these stereotypes by a detailed study of the impact of this project on Mt. Laurel, the neighborhoods surrounding the project, and its residents. There have been other studies of similar efforts to provide opportunities for low-income residents to move to the suburbs despite opposition, but this is a groundbreaking attempt to examine the impact of such a project over time. The authors of this study compare theirs to studies of the Gautreaux demonstration project arising out of the decision ordering the desegregation of Chicago’s public housing and to the subsequent five-city HUD-funded experiment in deconcentration of poverty in public housing: Moving to Opportunity (MTO). These studies focused on the impacts of the moves on the participants (mostly poor, minority tenants) to low-poverty, mostly white neighborhoods in largely inner ring suburbs.
In this study, the authors first review the history of racial segregation in housing, exclusionary zoning, and opposition to affordable housing. This includes the latest notable episode involving a successful lawsuit against Westchester County, New York, because of its exclusionary zoning and subsequent attempts to implement a settlement to build affordable housing in its mostly white communities. The authors then recount the efforts of Ethel Lawrence and the attorneys who challenged Mt. Laurel’s zoning to convince the New Jersey courts to outlaw it. This was then followed by growing efforts to implement the two major rulings, state legislation to implement them, although in a weakened form, and subsequent events.
The authors carefully detail the design and management features of the Ethel Lawrence Homes (ELH) intended to confront the negative visions of subsidized housing by many suburbanites. In this case, this is not mixed-income housing (like the HOPE VI projects that replaced distressed public housing) but a project occupied entirely by poor tenants. The authors first focus on those three primary concerns of opponents, using comparative data from neighboring communities. In each case, they found no evidence of significant increases in crime or property taxes or a decline in the property values of neighboring homeowners attributable to the Ethel Lawrence Homes and its residents. They surveyed Mt. Laurel residents and neighbors of the project to determine their awareness of the completed project and their interaction, if any, with its low-income residents. They found little specific awareness of the project, even among its immediate neighbors, and little interaction between project occupants (many of whom came from Camden) and nearby neighbors (table 6.2, p. 103). A key aspect of the project which contributed to this finding was its design intended to have it blend in among neighboring market-based subdivisions (illustrated at figure 3.2, p. 56). This design, along with the amenities provided, made the financing even more difficult than usual, with the Low Income Housing Tax Credits proving crucial.
Like the two other studies previously mentioned, this study also looked at the effects of the project and its location on its residents. As of the monitoring study in 2009–2010, 58.6 percent of the residents were black, 29.3 percent were Hispanic, and only 9.5 percent were white. In contrast, the racial profile of the neighbors surveyed reflected the predominance of whites in this rapidly growing town transformed from its rural past. Ninety-four percent of the neighbors were white (table 6.1, p. 101). When the project opened in 2000, the median household income of Mt. Laurel residents was $63,800, 83.7 percent were homeowners, and the poverty rate was only 3.1 percent (table 4.1, p. 69). In looking at the experience of the residents during the study period, the authors used as a control group a sample of those applicants who were not chosen to live in ELH. Both were surveyed about such issues as their exposure to disorder and violence, stress and key life events, social support, and meeting daily needs (all compared to residents’ experience in their previous residences). The authors found: Despite the inevitable problems emanating from the racial and class divide that separate ELH residents from their neighbors in Mount Laurel, and despite certain criticisms of the project’s location and management practices, the balance of pros and cons was decidedly positive for all residents and they were more than willing to put up with uncomfortable racial and class undercurrents in return for a high-quality home in a safe and secure neighborhood that, despite its pastoral location, nonetheless provided access to resources for their daily needs and enabled social interactions with friends and relatives. (p. 146)
The ELH residents were also asked about mobility issues, including mental health, climbing the economic ladder, and educational resources (at home and the schools), and the educational achievement of their children. While their employment situation improved, there was limited data regarding the educational results for their children coming from mostly poorly rated schools. The conclusion was that they were receiving a better education while their grades had not improved.
The authors made this overall conclusion: In terms of social policy, our results suggest that the development of affordable housing projects in affluent suburbs constitutes an efficacious means to lower levels of racial and class segregation while increasing social mobility for disadvantaged inner-city residents . . . [benefits] were accomplished without imposing significant social costs on project residents or economic costs on project neighbors or the suburban community in general. (p. 193)
While this is a study of only one such project, given the previous paucity of data about the occupants of the suburban affordable housing in New Jersey suburbs as a result of the Mt. Laurel doctrine, this is a very noteworthy contribution to our understanding of its impact. Similar studies of group homes for the disabled, which faced vocal opposition despite protective federal law, found similar results on impacted neighborhoods and residents once the projects were occupied.
The authors document their methodology, and the text includes informative tables and figures explaining the comparative data. There are also illustrative quotes from those surveyed and accompanying photos of the project, its site, and the community. This study will be of particular interest to affordable housing advocates, organizations seeking to provide greater racial and economic diversity in the population of suburbs, and suburban planners.