A new affordable housing development, Cornerstone at Lacey III, is accepting applications for 70 new apartment units in Lacey, Ocean County, until the end of the month.
This will be the third phase of the development which will now have 188 units and will help fulfill the state-mandate for low-to-moderate income housing in the township.
“This finishes up my prior, round-three obligation,” Veronica Laureigh, the township administrator, told NJ Advance Media this week. “We keep building these units, whether they are affordable or market-rate, and some people don’t want to see that.
“It’s the NIMBY effect, Not In My Backyard. Community members don’t recognize that we need it until they’re the ones that need it.”
Laureigh knows her township well. She has been employed by it for 42 years, starting with a summer job at 16. The first affordable housing here opened eight years ago, with the first phase of Cornerstone at Lacey.
The obligation to create affordable homes is recalculated in cycles known as rounds. Those obligations are determined by looking at the need for low-to-moderate-income housing in each municipality.
Each of the state’s 564 municipalities are required to create plans that realistically zone for affordable housing on land available for residential development.
Gov. Phil Murphy signed new affordable-housing legislation into law last year to streamline municipal obligations, which for the past decade had fallen to state courts to enforce.
The state’s first affordable housing laws were passed in 1985 and a series of state Supreme Court rulings from 1975 to 2015 have been upheld.
The majority of Lacey is in the state Pinelands Reserve, which has restrictive building requirements.
The Cornerstone at Lacey is a 19-acre, former nursing home property the township owns near the Garden State Parkway.
“I found what I like to do in life, and this is it,” Joe Del Duca, an executive in the Walters Group, the builders of Corner at Lacey, told NJ Advance Media. “If that person who hates affordable housing, the next time they go to the restaurant and the waiter who is waiting on them, or the driver of the school bus taking the children to school – you want to tell me that you don’t want those people to live in your community?
“That’s what affordable housing is doing, (helping) the people who are already part of the fabric of your community but just can’t afford to live here.”
Municipalities are expected to add or rehabilitate more than 146,000 units of affordable housing by 2035, according to the state’s new calculations. But other state and national studies place needed units at up to 240,000.
Del Duca said he is also proud that affordable housing promotes diverse communities that have the potential to lift everyone’s quality of life. His company has built and operates more than 2,000 affordable-housing properties across the state.
Source: www.nj.com
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