The absurdity of New Jersey’s ill-conceived affordable housing laws is now playing out in full public view atop the highlands of Morris County in the tiny rustic borough of Mendham (population 4,973). First settled in the 1720s, the historic colonial town of Mendham provided support to George Washington and his troops during key New Jersey battles of the American Revolution.
Mendham residents are currently waging a different kind of fight—this time to stop the construction of a five-story, 75-unit apartment complex located in the center of town that is being pushed on the borough by state officials.
For the past 50 years, New Jersey has had a constitutional requirement that every municipality in the state must provide its “fair share” of affordable housing, as calculated by progressive bureaucrats in Trenton. Dubbed the Mount Laurel doctrine, these laws have been steadily ratcheted up over time, particularly over the past decade under the administration of former Governor Phil Murphy.
To pressure local officials into Mount Laurel compliance, the state resorts to strong-arm legal tactics, as highlighted by Mendham’s recent shake-down experience. For the Third Round of fair share calculations covering the period 1999 through 2025, Mendham’s unmet affordable housing need was set at 152 units, equivalent to 8% of the borough’s total household count of 1,802 as of 2024.
Armed with this, a private real estate developer then proposed an apartment building project with 75 rental units, 15 or 20% of which would be set aside for low- and moderate-income tenants. For Mendham, this was an offer that town government could not refuse.
Shockingly, New Jersey law allows private developers to bring so-called builder's remedy lawsuits against any town that blocks high-density housing projects that would help a municipality to satisfy its Mount Laurel obligation. Since the standard of proof is low for such cases, and successful plaintiffs would be entitled to court-ordered rezoning potentially covering more than just the property in question, few New Jersey towns are willing to take the open-ended risk.
To preserve its “immunity” from such “exclusionary zoning litigation,” Mendham was forced to sign legal settlements in 2019 with both the real estate company involved and the Fair Share Housing Center, the litigious state-affiliated housing advocacy group that has tag-teamed with the New Jersey Builders Association on more than 340 such agreements since 2015. As part of its consent decrees, Mendham agreed to change the town’s zoning laws to specifically make way for the controversial apartment complex.
While the project was formally approved by the local planning board in 2025, an alliance of town residents is still appealing that decision in New Jersey Superior Court, alleging that corners were cut regarding environmental regulations—the hilltop borough is located at the headwaters of three major river basins, and the proposed development backs up to wetlands—and other zoning ordinances as part of the quid pro quo agreements signed in 2019.
Originally intended to solve the real problem of racial discrimination in the real estate market, the Mount Laurel doctrine has since devolved into a means of spreading high-density housing throughout the suburbs, mainly through the court-protected 4-to-1 builder’s remedy multiplier. Judging by the number of protest yard signs popping up everywhere, these ubiquitous well-appointed Soviet housing blocks are hugely unpopular with town residents, not just in Mendham but across the Garden State.
For small towns, the large, transient populations that come with these outsized rental apartment buildings complicate resource planning and place a significant strain on public services, especially schools. In the Mendham example, the borough has only one grade and middle school, with total enrollment of roughly 500 students. An influx of 75 new families with just one child each could easily overwhelm the local school system.
For prospective renters, it is also no bargain given the degrees of physical separation from the local community. To date, many New Jersey towns have sited their fair share-forced housing projects either along railroad lines and highways or within commercial and industrial zones or simply on the edge of town. In Mendham’s case, the project is located behind a supermarket and strip mall, further hemmed in by a new car dealership and an existing lumber store—not exactly country living at its finest.
New Jersey municipalities have finally started to push back legally against the rigged Mount Laurel game. A coalition of 40 New Jersey towns (including Mendham) has now sued in state and federal court to challenge the 2024 New Jersey law governing the current Fourth Round of the program and the entire unfair fair share system itself.
Why are the state’s largest cities—including Newark, Paterson and Jersey City—exempt from building new affordable housing units under the Mount Laurel diktats? This pushes a greater fair share housing burden on smaller towns even though large cities account for the lion’s share of New Jersey’s renter, low-income and homeless populations.
Why do affordable housing requirements continue to inexorably rise even for New Jersey towns that are shrinking? Mendham’s population has declined slightly over the past 25 years, yet the borough must still come up with an incremental 124 low-income units over 2025-2035 under the Fourth Round of Mount Laurel—this on top of the 152 just solved for in Round #3. This guarantees more unsolicited builder remedies for Mendham to fend off going forward.
The current coercive and inequitable system where private real estate developers serve as legal enforcers and leverage arbitrary fair share mandates to run roughshod over local zoning and effectively urbanize suburban towns is not what New Jersey’s Supreme Court had in mind when it issued its foundational affordable housing ruling back in 1975. Half a century later, the Mount Laurel doctrine has become a social engineering experiment that is slowly destroying the quality of life and changing the local character of small towns across the Garden State. Just ask Mendham.
Mr. Tice is a senior fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics, an adjunct professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business and author of the book, “The Race to Zero: How ESG Investing Will Crater the Global Financial System.”
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