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63 Rutgers L. Rev. 849 (2010-2011)
The Mount Laurel Doctrine and the Uncertainties of Social Policy in a Time of Retrenchment

handle is hein.journals/rutlr63 and id is 857 raw text is: THE MOUNT LAUREL DOCTRINE AND THE UNCERTAINTIES OF SOCIAL POLICY IN A TIME OF RETRENCHMENT Alan Mallach* The New Jersey Supreme Court's Mount Laurel decisions (1975 and 1983)1 ruled that local zoning had to take into account regional housing needs, obligating the state's 566 localities to provide their fair share of affordable housing. Although these two decisions have long been seen across the nation as seminal ones with respect to land use and affordable housing opportunity, their role in New Jersey land use regulation and practice remains hotly contested many decades later. The cumbersome procedures and micro-management of local planning that have ensued have failed to satisfy either local governments or housing advocates, while the Council on Affordable Housing, created to implement the court's mandate, has never found political legitimacy. As the political climate has shifted in recent years, with Governor Christie seemingly committed to abolishing the Council on Affordable Housing and housing advocates fighting a rearguard action, the Mount Laurel principles and the entire concept of fair share housing are at risk. INITIAL PROGRESS The 1975 Mount Laurel I decision arose from a case brought by the Southern Burlington County NAACP on behalf of low-income African-American residents in a section of Mount Laurel Township, a growing suburb of Philadelphia, who were denied the opportunity to build decent housing to replace the dilapidated homes in which many of them lived.2 The court used the case to establish a clear doctrine that every developing municipality had an obligation under the New Jersey Constitution to provide for its fair share of the regional * Alan Mallach is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. He has written extensively on exclusionary and inclusionary zoning, and was an expert witness at the first Mount Laurel trial in 1972. 1. S. Burlington Cnty. NAACP v. Twp. of Mt. Laurel (Mount Laurel 1), 336 A.2d 713 (N.J. 1975); S. Burlington Cnty. NAACP v. Twp. of Mt. Laurel (Mount Laurel II), 456 A.2d 390 (N.J. 1983). 2. See generally DAVID L. KIRP ET AL., OUR TowN: RACE, HOUSING AND THE SOUL OF SUBURBIA (1995). 849