Jersey City Mayor James Solomon wrote a letter to state Senate President Nick Scutari (D-22) today asking him to change parts of a New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s (NJDEP) proposal to aid affordable housing efforts in urban cities.
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By John Heinis/Hudson County View
“We are not asking the state to abandon climate preparedness, instead we are asking for rules to be reasonably tailored to the needs of cities like Jersey City,” the mayor wrote on Thursday.
“Our top planning and infrastructure officials have reviewed the REAL [Resilient Environments and Landscapes] regulations, and based on their analysis we believe that the rules—in their current form—would impose serious, unworkable burdens on development, rehabilitation, and renovation in Jersey City, critically including our efforts to build substantially more affordable housing.”
Solomon further stated that while there is no need to start from scratch, adjustments need to be made in order for this plan to be fair and equitable for all, not just municipalities down the shore.
Noting that both the city and their municipal utilities authority (MUA) took action to prepare for climate change in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, he went into some detail about which aspects of the state-led effort could be detrimental to Jersey City.
“The requirement to elevate all new and substantially improved construction four feet above current FEMA flood standards for a 100-year storm would dramatically increase the cost of building and rehabilitation across the city. These are costs that will ultimately fall on tenants, small businesses, and families,” Solomon asserted.
“The proposed Inundation Risk Zones extend deep into historic residential neighborhoods like Van Vorst, Paulus Hook, Hamilton Park, and Communipaw, where compliance would be extremely costly or even physically impossible, and would in many cases significantly conflict with Historic Preservation requirements in these neighborhoods.”
Adding that “substantial improvement” is not clearly defined and that the underlying climate map doesn’t take into account existing infrastructure such as the Long Slip Canal, Solomon notes that he fears this approach will make housing projects “a last resort.”
“While the NJDEP has included a theoretical exemption for affordable housing projects, it is already apparent that the process to get such exemptions will be murky and onerous on top of a process that already includes numerous regulatory hurdles that increase costs,” he also said in the letter.
“In practice, the increased costs of construction and rehabilitation driven by these rules will make affordable housing development significantly harder to finance and build. We cannot accept a framework that treats affordable housing exemptions as a last resort rather than a genuine priority.”
The NJDEP adopted REAL rule amendments on on January 20th, with the full document longer than Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” at a whopping 1,531 pages.
Scutari’s office did not return an email seeking comment on Thursday.