Local Planning

At the 2025 New Jersey Planning and Redevelopment Conference, hosted in partnership by New Jersey Future and the New Jersey Chapter of the American Planning Association, Beth Osborne—Interim President and CEO of Smart Growth America—delivered a keynote that challenged and inspired. In front of a packed audience of planners, community advocates, and developers, Osborne made one thing clear: transformative change starts locally.

New Jersey is amidst a deepening housing crisis—particularly an affordability crisis. In all corners of the state, longtime residents are being priced out of their homes as housing costs soar. In fact, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, New Jersey has a shortage of over 200,000 housing units for low-income residents. Newark now ranks as the most difficult city in the United States to find a rental property. More than one-third of New Jersey residents are cost-burdened, meaning that they spend more than 30% of their income on housing. These statistics make one thing clear: New Jersey’s housing crisis cannot be ignored.

New Jersey’s high housing costs make life difficult for everyone, especially individuals and households at the lower end of the income spectrum. New Jersey’s Mount Laurel doctrine addresses the need for housing for lower-income households. The process by which towns satisfy their affordable housing obligations was recently updated with the passage of new legislation (now colloquially referred to as A4/S50), which established a formal methodology for determining municipal obligations and laid out a timeline of compliance for municipalities to follow.

Municipalities face a tricky balancing act when it comes to infrastructure improvements: they need to address large, costly projects but have limited resources to fund them. Historically, issuing debt has been the primary means that municipalities are left with to finance critical improvements. However, municipal leaders are reluctant to be the ones responsible for issuing debt, while utilities and public systems are often hesitant to raise rates to cover project costs.

While New Jersey is one of the most diverse states in the nation at the macro level, at the local level it is also one of the most segregated. The state has grown more demographically diverse over the last two decades, but most of its individual towns and neighborhoods are either predominantly white or predominantly non-white, with few places occupying the “diverse” range in between.

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.

In this report, New Jersey Future and Smart Growth America analyzed per-capita road usage. The results show that places with the highest activity density have the lowest per-capita usage, suggesting per-capita road-maintenance costs can be reduced by even marginal increases in density. November 2015.

A one-hour webinar explaining a new, parcel-based tool that assesses financial vulnerability to coastal flooding and sea-level rise. Friday, May 15, 2015, noon – 1:00 pm.

An interim report, three years after Hurricane Sandy, on New Jersey Future’s groundbreaking local recovery planning manager program, including lessons learned and recommendations. October 2015.