​​Let’s make housing production a reality in N.J.

Updated: Apr. 09, 2025, 2:53 p.m.|Published: Apr. 09, 2025, 2:12 p.m.

Published on NJ.com

Utilizing abandoned sites and encouraging subsidies could be a viable step to building much-needed housing. Reena Rose Sibayan | The Jersey Journal

By Alonzo Perry and Katrina Forman | New Jersey Together

The race for governor has provoked another round of intense discussion about what every candidate recognizes as a crisis: the very high cost of housing. No matter who the candidate is – Republican or Democrat – there is no disagreement about the nature of the problem.

We are leaders of New Jersey Together, with affiliates in Essex, Hudson, and Morris counties and relationships with institutions and leaders in neighboring counties.

We have begun meeting with candidates, have read their housing platforms, and have heard them speak in town halls and on podcasts. And we’ve concluded that there is one common denominator among them all: They overcomplicate a straightforward issue.

If we are to build our way out of the housing hole the state finds itself in, there must be a bipartisan commitment to clarity about the two keys to a successful production strategy: sites and subsidies.

The easiest of the two is sites. While New Jersey is a very dense state, it is also home to thousands of small sites and scores of large sites – all of which could someday be filled with quality affordable and market-rate housing.

Bayfront in Jersey City is a 100-acre site, completely cleaned of the chromium contamination left by the Honeywell Corporation, that could and should be home to 8,400 units.

Our Jersey City affiliate forced Honeywell to clean the site and then encouraged the city to buy it. But, in the seven years since the city claimed ownership, not a single unit has been built, and the groundbreaking for phase one of 240 units is a few months away.

If it’s a crisis, as everyone agrees, then the city and the state should take full and immediate advantage of this opportunity. A few miles away, there is a second 100-acre site, Canal Crossing, where thousands more homes and apartments can be built, once the environmental remediation is completed in a year or so.

A few miles away, in Newark, there are abandoned housing authority sites, one capable of supporting more than 500 homes and another 700 units that could and should be used for affordable housing. About 75 miles south, in Camden, there are large waterfront sites offered to the Philadelphia 76ers owners, who eventually opted to remain across the river.

There are many more – abandoned hospitals or mental institutions, defunct shopping centers, a large former convent and retreat area in Mendham – that could support critical masses of affordable owner-occupied homes that hardworking New Jerseyites would love to buy rather than move to Houston, Florida, or the Poconos.

The next governor should identify all of them and dedicate a team to work with groups like ours to transform these vacant acres into lively new communities.

Another source of sites is hiding in plain sight – hundreds upon hundreds of congregations in every city, town, and rural area that are willing to dedicate all or most of their sites to create affordable housing.

The repurposing of sites where congregations are dwindling or moribund would enable religious institutions to create a next generation of useful life for their land and facilities – aiding people with special needs, those driven into homelessness by the acute housing scarcity in our communities, or individuals seeking to rebuild their lives after serving time in prison.

As with the large sites, there would need to be a dedicated team reporting directly to the next governor, whose mission would be to deliver development at scale and speed.

That leads us to the second priority: subsidy. There is no way to generate a minimum of 30,000 new units a year without a major commitment of state resources. Because it often takes five or more years for developers to move from concept to groundbreaking, they factor the cost of this delay into their budgets and consume growing amounts of subsidy for declining numbers of units.

A state that guarantees large-scale development opportunities in a timely fashion can attract better prices from builders and spread the subsidy across more units. Would other approaches be helpful? Transit-oriented development? Municipalities meeting their often-delayed affordable housing obligations? Of course. But the two keys we have described – sites and subsidies – would stimulate much more development in more places in a timelier way.

The next governor has an incredible opportunity. He or she can reopen the door to ownership and equity building to the next generation of New Jersey residents.

The Rev. Alonzo Perry is the co-chair of Jersey City Together. The Rev. Katrina Forman is the co-chair of Essex Together. Both groups are affiliates of New Jersey Together — a non-partisan citizens power network.