Opinion ID: 2365726
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 8

Heading: Fair Share and Region General Considerations

Text: The probative value of the Kim and Abeles fair share studies should be appraised against the background of the substantial body of experience that has been developed by governmental planning bodies in recent years in devising fair share plans for voluntary housing planning purposes as distinguished from litigation. All of them involve realistic housing market areas larger and functionally more appropriate, in Mount Laurel terms, than the small Middlesex County region. Before discussing those specific plans, some preliminary observations as to the concepts of fair share and region seem appropriate by way of background. Of primary significance is the difference between the situation of an administrative planning agency functioning under authorizing legislation and that of a court dealing with an attack by litigation on the adequacy of the zoning ordinance of an isolated municipality. The former is dealing with a comprehensive, predetermined region and can render or delegate the making of allocations with relative fairness to all of the constituent municipalities or other subregions within its jurisdiction. [37] Moreover, it presumably has expertise suited to the task. The correlative disadvantages of a court adjudicating an individual dispute are obvious. [38] The formulation of a plan for fixing of the fair share of the regional need for lower income housing attributable to a particular developing municipality, although clearly envisaged in Mount Laurel, 67 N.J. at 162, 189-190, involves highly controversial economic, sociological and policy questions of innate difficulty and complexity. Where predictive responses are called for they are apt to be speculative or conjectural. [39] These observations are supported not only by the published literature [40] but by the proofs and comprehensive briefs supplied us by the parties and amici. Some of the problems catalogued above were touched upon in Mount Laurel, e.g., region, 67 N.J. at 162, 189-190; incidence of subsidized construction in contemplation, id. at 170, n. 8, 188, n. 21; sources of reliance for fair share guidance, id. at 190; quantity of needed housing reasonably expectable under proper zoning, id. at 188, n. 21. We take this occasion to make explicit what we adumbrated in Mount Laurel and have intimated above  that the governmental-sociological-economic enterprise of seeing to the provision and allocation throughout appropriate regions of adequate and suitable housing for all categories of the population is much more appropriately a legislative and administrative function rather than a judicial function to be exercised in the disposition of isolated cases. [41] Cf. 67 N.J. at 189, n. 22, 190. Fortunately, the other branches of government are giving the matter their attention. [42] But unless and until other appropriate governmental machinery is effective brought to bear the courts have no choice, when an ordinance is challenged on Mount Laurel grounds, but to deal with this vital public welfare matter as effective as is consistent with the limitations of the judicial process. We address the question, implicated by defendant's evidential studies, of the appropriate concept of a region in the context of a litigation challenging the housing adequacy of a particular zoning ordinance. Defendant purports to justify its fair share allocation on the basis of a single county as a region. However, both the Kim and the Abeles studies, in estimating anticipatorily the need for and supply of housing as of 1975 in Middlesex County, apparently recognized the influence of growth of population and jobs emanating from the broader region of northeastern New Jersey and the New York metropolitan region. Thus, while it is questionable whether the functionally relevant regional housing need was adequately realized in the Kim and Abeles studies, it does appear that in effect they envisaged a need emanating beyond the county boundaries. The technical details of the basis for fair-share allocations of regional goals among municipalities, pertaining as they do to an area of considerable complexity and theoretical diversity, are not as important to a reviewing court concerned with effectuating Mount Laurel objectives as the consideration that the gross regional goal shared by the constituent municipalities be large enough fairly to reflect the full needs of the housing market area of which the subject municipality forms a part. In broad principle, we believe Judge Furman was correct in conceiving the appropriate region for Madison Township as the area from which, in view of available employment and transportation, the population of the township would be drawn, absent invalidly exclusionary zoning. 128 N.J. Super. at 441. This is essentially like the housing market area concept espoused in the Abeles report as sound in principle, although not directly employed in the Abeles fair share study. The concept of county per se as the appropriate region was thought not to be realistic by Justice Hall in writing Mount Laurel. He there said (67 N.J. at 189-190): The composition of the applicable region will necessarily vary from situation to situation and probably no hard and fast rule will serve to furnish the answer in every case. Confinement to or within a certain county appears not to be realistic, but restriction within the boundaries of the state seems practical and advisable. (This is not to say that a developing municipality can ignore a demand for housing within its boundaries on the part of people who commute to work in another state.) Justice Hall defined the region applicable there as the outer ring of the South Jersey metropolitan area, which area we define as those portions of Camden, Burlington and Gloucester Counties within a semicircle having a radius of 20 miles or so from the heart of Camden city. 67 N.J. at 162, 190. What was material to that determination was the proximity of Mount Laurel to the highly urbanized Camden area, its residential development due to the influx of new residents from nearby central cities, existing and projected employment patterns, the highway network linking Mount Laurel with all parts of the Camden area and the contrast of its vacant acreage (65%) with the land supply situation in those nearby central cities. See 67 N.J. at 161-162. For purposes of our present problem, we distinguish the situation with which we would be confronted if the municipality whose ordinance was under attack had been the subject of an official fair share housing study of a group of counties or municipalities conducted under such auspices as the DVPRC or the planning boards of a county or group of counties functioning under Executive Order No. 35 (see note 42, supra ). We conceivably might regard a region so constructed, and the dependent fair share allocations thereby arrived at, as meriting prima facie judicial acceptance. The Kim and Abeles studies before us do not have that authority or stature, and we have accorded them only such weight as they deserve on their merits, as analyzed above. [43] For examples of regions large enough and sufficiently integrated economically to form legitimately functional housing market areas, we turn to some of the pioneering fair share allocation plans executed under official or quasi-official auspices. The Miami Valley (Dayton, Ohio) Regional Planning Commission includes five counties and 31 municipalities as far as 60 miles from the center of Dayton. The Metropolitan Washington GOG (see supra p. 529) covers 15 counties and local governmental jurisdictions, including the District of Columbia, San Bernardino County, California, although a county, occupies 20,000 square miles. The Metropolitan Council of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St. Paul) covers 7 counties, including almost 300 jurisdictions, with a total population of 1.9 million. The DVRPC, as already shown, comprises nine counties in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The present significance of the cited plans is that their regions are of such size that it is difficult to conceive of a substantial demand for housing therein coming from any one locality outside the jurisdictional region, even absent exclusionary zoning. The essence of the cited plans is to provide families in those economic categories [low and moderate] a choice of location. 16 Trends on Housing, No. 2 p. 2 (1972). We thus proceed to formulation of our position as to the concept of region in the context of an ad hoc application of Mount Laurel principles to a single litigated ordinance, having in mind our determination in II, supra, that it would not generally be serviceable to employ a formulaic approach to determination of a particular municipality's fair share. We conclude that, in general, there is no specific geographical area which is necessarily the authoritative region as to any single municipality in litigation. Different experts may quite reasonably differ in their concepts of the pertinent region. See Lindbloom, Defining `Fair Share' of `Regional Need', 98 N.J.L.J. 633-634 (July 24, 1975). But in evaluating any expert testimony in terms of the Mount Laurel rationale, weight should be given to the degree to which the expert gives consideration to the areas from which the lower income population of the municipality would substantially be drawn absent exclusionary zoning. (Evidence of the historical sources of a municipality's population, among other indicia, is relevent thereto.) This is broadly comparable to the concept of the relevant housing market area, to which there has been prior reference herein. The factors which draw most candidates for residence to a municipality include not only, for employed persons and those seeking employment, reasonable proximity thereto of jobs and availability of transportation to jobs, as mentioned by Judge Furman and stressed by most of the experts, [44] but proximity to and convenience of shopping, schools and other amenities. Retired people, who represent a substantial part of the lower to moderate income population, might be attracted from a greater distance than employed people. Finally, we submit general observations as to the techniques of fair share allocation to municipalities within an assumedly valid region. There is much greater diversity among the experts in this regard than in relation to determining pertinent regions. Moreover, as already noted herein, harm to the objective of securing adequate opportunity for lower income housing is less likely from imperfect allocation models than from undue restriction of the pertinent region. The essential thing from that standpoint is that the true regional need be adequately quantified. The trial court specified that for Madison to meet its fair share of the housing needs of the region its zoning ordinance must approximate in additional housing unit capacity the same proportion of low-income housing as its present low-income population, about 12%, and the same proportion of moderate-income housing as its moderate-income population, about 19%. The 1973 ordinance was held palpably short of these requirements. 128 N.J. Super. at 447. Mount Laurel devised no formula for estimating fair share, but the matter was left for the municipality to apply the expertise of the municipal planning adviser, the county planning boards and the state planning agency. 67 N.J. at 190. The number and variety of considerations which have been deemed relevant in the formulation of fair share plans is such as to underscore our earlier observation that the entire problem involved is essentially and functionally a legislative and administrative, not a judicial one. [45] The formula specified by the trial court would not necessarily be properly utilizable in other contexts. Some municipalities might have such very high or very low existing proportions of lower-income families in their population makeup as to render such a formula patently unfair. If the existing municipal proportions correspond at least roughly with the proportions of the appropriate region the formula would appear prima facie fair. The evidence herein is that the stated municipal proportions approximate those of the county of Middlesex. We are without data as to comparative proportions of such a larger area as would include the more urban counties in the northeast New Jersey region. Harking back to our statement in II as to why we proposed in this opinion to discuss the concepts of fair share and region notwithstanding that we would not, nor would we require the trial court to specify a pertinent region or fix a fair share housing quota for Madison, we summarize the observations in VII and VIII as follows: 1. Based upon our analysis and findings in IV and VI, the 1973 ordinance is clearly deficient in meeting Madison's obligation to share in providing the opportunity for lower cost housing needed in the region, whether or not the specific fair share estimates submitted by defendant are acceptable. These estimates are, in any event, defective at least in not including prospective need beyond 1975. 2. The objective of a court before which a zoning ordinance is challenged on Mount Laurel grounds is to determine whether it realistically permits the opportunity to provide a fair and reasonable share of the region's need for housing for the lower income population. 3. The region referred to in 2 is that general area which constitutes, more or less, the housing market area of which the subject municipality is a part, and from which the prospective population of the municipality would substantially be drawn. In the absence of exclusionary zoning. 4. Fair share allocation studies submitted in evidence may be given such weight as they appear to merit in the light of statements 2 and 3 above. But the court is not required, in the determination of the matter, itself to adopt fair share housing quotas for the municipality in question or to make findings in reference thereto.