Judge rejects NJ towns' affordable-housing study as skewed
In scathing language, a Middlesex County judge has thrown out a study that half of New Jersey's municipalities are using to calculate their legally mandated affordable-housing needs.
In scathing language, a Middlesex County judge has thrown out a study that half of New Jersey's municipalities are using to calculate their legally mandated affordable-housing needs.
In a 100-page opinion issued Thursday, Superior Court Judge Douglas Wolfson wrote that the analysis that Econsult Solutions of Philadelphia Inc. prepared last year repeatedly "diverged" from the methodologies stipulated by the state Supreme Court, apparently in the hope of reducing its clients' obligations.
Parts of the report were "fundamentally flawed" as a result, the judge concluded.
About 280 of the state's 565 municipalities have been relying on the Econsult study as expert opinion in their efforts to win court approval of their affordable-housing plans.
Jeffrey R. Surenian, a Brielle lawyer who hired Econsult on behalf of the consortium, said Wolfson's opinion did not have standing outside Middlesex County. Other Superior Court judges reviewing affordable-housing plans "will have the opportunity to draw their own conclusions" about Econsult's methods and integrity, he said.
Surenian said he was "not surprised" by the decision. Before he was a judge, he said, Wolfson was the attorney many builders hired when they wanted to win a court order allowing them to build affordable housing.
Wolfson's opinion stems from a trial in May over whether South Brunswick was honoring its affordable-housing obligations as required by the state Supreme Court's Mount Laurel decisions.
South Brunswick presented Peter Angelides, president of Econsult, as a witness to explain the report.
But under questioning by lawyers from the Fair Share Housing Center, an advocacy group with intervenor status, Angelides told the court that he could not vouch for the accuracy of certain calculations in the report.
The judge wrote that he believed Angelides had been "less than forthright" in some of his testimony, and opined that in his report Angelides evinced "an apparent willingness to diverge from [established] methodologies so long as it decreases the township's affordable housing obligation."
This, Wolfson continued, "seems to reflect a pattern of `results oriented' design [in the Econsult study] that occurs with too much frequency to be entirely coincidental."
By contrast, he said, Princeton planner David Kinsey "adhered strictly" to the methodologies ordered by the Supreme Court in his 2015 study for Fair Share Housing.
Kinsey's study, which Fair Share cites regularly before the courts, determined that many municipalities had affordable housing obligations two to three times greater than those calculated by Econsult.
Surenian said Friday that he never asked Angelides to write a report that minimized municipalities' obligations. "We did not preordain," he said. "We said, `Tell us what you think'."
A spokesman for Fair Share agreed Friday that Wolfson's opinion does not set precedent outside Middlesex County, but believed it would be "influential" among other judges.
For more than a year, municipalities and courts have been struggling over how to calculate affordable housing obligations.
In March 2015, the Supreme Court concluded that the Council on Affordable Housing — the state agency charged with implementing the 1985 Fair Housing Act —had for 15 years failed to devise an acceptable formula for calculating towns' affordable housing obligations.
It dissolved COAH and ordered all municipalities to devise new plans, and instructed the state's 15 Superior Court vicinages to review and certify them.
The high court further decreed that towns should only use the various formulas that COAH had used in the 1980s and '90s.
In his opinion, Wolfson concluded that Angelides had "devised his own approach" when calculating the percentage of low- and middle-income households in need of affordable housing.
The opinion was good news for Fair Share, which recently lost a case before the Appellate Division.
A three-judge panel ruled July 11 that municipalities do not have to zone for affordable housing units that were not zoned for between 1999 and 2015, when COAH could not create a formula for calculating their obligations.
Fair Share on Thursday filed an appeal of that ruling with the Supreme Court.
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