Opinion ID: 2365726
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Fair Share and Region Preliminary Considerations

Text: As noted above, the prime question before us, in Mount Laurel terms, is whether the trial court has correctly found that Madison's zoning ordinance does not provide the opportunity to meet a fair share of the regional burden for low and moderate income housing needs. We have seen that the trial court did not specify the precise boundaries of the applicable region nor fix an absolute number of appropriate housing units to be provided. It merely described the pertinent region as the area from which the population of the township would be drawn, absent exclusionary zoning. A substantial body of evidence was adduced by the defendant below purporting to specify Madison's fair share of Middlesex County's unmet need for low and moderate income housing as of 1975. Moreover, the record before us, the briefs and the literature in the field supply abundant data concerning methods and techniques for estimating a municipality's fair share of a regional housing need. We propose to comment on these matters hereinafter, for three purposes: (a) to explain our conclusion that the evidence concerning fair share adduced by defendant does not refute the trial court determination that the Madison ordinance is deficient in the respects noted; (b) to elucidate the considerations relating to the appropriate region whose housing needs are relevant to this action; and (c) to furnish guidance to courts, counsel and expert witnesses in this area in applying the principles of Mount Laurel to litigated controversies generally. However, we deem it well to establish at the outset that we do not regard it as mandatory for developing municipalities whose ordinances are challenged as exclusionary to devise specific formulae for estimating their precise fair share of the lower income [4] housing needs of a specifically demarcated region. Nor do we conceive it as necessary for a trial court to make findings of that nature in a contested case. Firstly, numerical housing goals are not realistically translatable into specific substantive changes in a zoning ordinance by any technique revealed to us by our study of the data before us. There are too many imponderables between a zone change and the actual production of housing on sites as zoned, not to mention the production of a specific number of lower cost units in a given period of time. Municipalities do not themselves have the duty to build or subsidize housing. Secondly, the breadth of approach by the experts to the factor of the appropriate region and to the criteria for allocation of regional housing goals to municipal subregions is so great and the pertinent economic and sociological considerations so diverse as to preclude judicial dictation or acceptance of any one solution as authoritative. For the same reasons, we would not mandate the formula approach as obligatory on any municipality seeking to correct a fair share deficiency. We are convinced from the record and data before us that attention by those concerned, whether courts or local governing bodies, to the substance of a zoning ordinance under challenge and to bona fide efforts toward the elimination or minimization of undue cost-generating requirements in respect of reasonable areas of a developing municipality represents the best promise for adequate productiveness without resort to formulaic estimates of specific unit fair shares of lower cost housing by any of the complex and controversial allocation models now coming into vogue. [5] It is desirable that administrative agencies acting under legislative authorization assume the regulation of the housing distribution problem. Until then, in the current post- Mount Laurel period judicial emphasis on approaches such as those just outlined, and exemplified in the remedial section of this opinion, will, it is hoped, suffice to move the State toward the objective of available housing in the developing municipalities for a goodly number of the various categories of people of low and moderate income who desire to live therein and now cannot. Mount Laurel, 67 N.J., at 188, n. 21.