MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. — On a crisp afternoon, Ethel Lawrence Boulevard looks like any other street in this comfortable suburb. Kids play football in front of gray Cape Cod apartments, station wagons roll by, and an autumnal calm blankets the neighborhood.
"It looks normal, doesn't it?" asks Ethel Lawrence-Halley, who helps oversee the 140 apartments. "And that's just the point. After all the anger and hostility we had to deal with building these homes, they look like anywhere else."
Nestled in the heart of Mount Laurel, near Philadelphia, the Ethel Lawrence Homes are one of the few places in America where affordable housing has been built specifically for poor people -- mostly blacks and Latinos -- in an affluent community.
It took three decades of litigation, legislation and financial wizardry to construct these apartments, and the last tenants moved in this year. But the conflict continues. Some longtime residents remain angry, and activists voice frustration that more apartments haven't been built elsewhere.
During the last 20 years, New Jersey towns constructed 30,000 units of affordable housing, more than most states. Yet this falls far short of the need, estimated at 650,000 homes. And little of the new housing has been designated for the poor.
Next month, a state commission will issue new affordable housing goals for each community. But even before these figures are released, some officials warn that too much construction could worsen suburban sprawl, and activists worry that the state's commitment to affordable housing may erode.
The struggle to open suburbia to low-income people and minorities has been waged more intensely in New Jersey than any other state. And it's largely because of Ethel Lawrence -- a teacher who challenged the Garden State's exclusionary zoning laws 34 years ago.
She and others won a sweeping courtroom victory, convincing the New Jersey Supreme Court that communities had a constitutional obligation to build affordable housing for the region's poorest people. No other state has such a legal mandate.
"Ethel Lawrence was an astonishing person, and what she did was very brave," said David Kirp, co-author of "Our Town," a book about the Mount Laurel case.
"She took on the system, and she kept pushing the housing issue," added Kirp, who teaches public policy at UC Berkeley. "What she did was even more sustained than Rosa Parks."
