Demographics & Trends

New Jersey’s demographic shifts and our current housing supply and affordability crisis require planners and local officials to rethink what many consider “traditional” housing models and explore, embrace, and encourage a variety of living arrangements. Intergenerational housing models—living arrangements that bring together people of different generations, regardless of if they hold familial relationship—offer ways to meet our housing and community needs and plan for the future.

On Day 1 of the New Jersey Planning and Redevelopment Conference, the keynote session “The Road Ahead: Economic, Housing, and Real Estate Trends” painted a clear picture of the challenges and opportunities shaping New Jersey’s housing future—and why the stakes are higher than ever.

New Jersey is an expensive state, with among the highest housing costs in the country. It is also one of the most segregated states in the nation by both income and race, despite being one of the most racially diverse states overall. A new report from New Jersey Future explores the relationship between the enforcement of housing requirements, housing affordability, and racial and economic diversity, using a comparison between two demographically similar suburban counties—Morris and Monmouth—that followed different trajectories in complying with New Jersey’s affordable housing obligations.

2023 was a year full of many unpredictable environmental events ranging from major rainfall to extreme heat to a collapsed highway overpass. Our daily newsletter “What We’re Reading” brings our readers the most up-to-date articles covering our New Jersey Future issue areas and major developments in the Garden State.

As the world slowly but surely emerges from the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, all of us are evaluating the new parameters of our state and national economies that have experienced stimulus spending, historic inflation, supply chain disruptions, and high interest rates all in quick succession.

This report identifies strategies to lower both cost and risk in redevelopment projects, as redevelopment increasingly becomes the norm for accommodating growth in New Jersey. January 2016.

In this report, New Jersey Future analyzed housing affordability in each New Jersey municipality, to see where households headed by someone 65 or older have high housing costs. The places where housing cost burden is greatest fall into two groups: towns that are expensive for everyone, and towns that are dominated by larger, single-family housing stock. December 2015.

Development in the Pinelands growth areas has affected water resources and will continue to exert pressures going forward. This report highlights what can be done by municipal, regional and state agencies to minimize their negative impacts. July 2014.

This report and related case studies summarize the state of urban water infrastructure in New Jersey and how it affects residents and businesses. May 2014.

March 19, 2014 — A research report recently released by New Jersey Future, Creating Places to Age in New Jersey, evaluates municipalities’ land-use patterns based on how well designed they are to accommodate the changing mobility needs of an aging population.