Opinion ID: 1901249
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Removing Excessive Restrictions and Exactions

Text: In order to meet their Mount Laurel obligations, municipalities, at the very least, must remove all municipally created barriers to the construction of their fair share of lower income housing. Thus, to the extent necessary to meet their prospective fair share and provide for their indigenous poor (and, in some cases, a portion of the region's poor), municipalities must remove zoning and subdivision restrictions and exactions that are not necessary to protect health and safety. [25] It may be difficult for a municipality to determine how to balance the need to reduce the costs of its regulations against the need to adequately protect health and safety, just as it may be difficult for a court to determine when a municipality has reduced these costs enough. There are, however, relatively objective guides that can help both the municipality and the court. Particularly helpful, though in no way conclusive as to what the minimum standards should be in a particular community, are the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Minimum Property Standards and the suggestions as to minimum zoning and subdivision standards made by the Rutgers Center for Urban Policy Research in Housing Costs, supra at 212 n. 6. With these and other such guides, plus specific evidence submitted by the parties, we believe that a court can determine whether municipally-imposed housing costs have been sufficiently reduced. Once a municipality has revised its land use regulations and taken other steps affirmatively to provide a realistic opportunity for the construction of its fair share of lower income housing, the Mount Laurel doctrine requires it to do no more. For instance, a municipality having thus complied, the fact that its land use regulations contain restrictive provisions incompatible with lower income housing, such as bedroom restrictions, large lot zoning, prohibition against mobile homes, and the like, does not render those provisions invalid under Mount Laurel. Obviously, if they are otherwise invalid  for instance if they bear no reasonable relationship to any legitimate governmental goal  they may be declared void on those other grounds. But they are not void because of Mount Laurel under those circumstances. Mount Laurel is not an indiscriminate broom designed to sweep away all distinctions in the use of land. Municipalities may continue to reserve areas for upper income housing, may continue to require certain community amenities in certain areas, may continue to zone with some regard to their fiscal obligations: they may do all of this, provided that they have otherwise complied with their Mount Laurel obligations.