Home Is Where the Hurt Was

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The crusade for affordable housing took off in 1970 after an insult in church.

Mount Laurel then was a rural community of 11,200 with slightly more than 350 blacks. Residents had lived quietly together here since before the Civil War. But when some black residents met with Mayor William Haines after church services 34 years ago, many were troubled.

New single-family homes were going up all over town, at prices their grown children could not afford, they said. Why was the community blocking plans to build 34 garden apartments?

"If you people can't afford to live here," Haines said, "then you'll have to move."

Ethel Lawrence, a teacher and mother of nine, sat infuriated in the front pew, her daughter recalled. She had been leading the drive for low-cost housing, and believed that the town's refusal to permit zoning for apartments was morally wrong. Especially since the community was welcoming new, mostly white residents to one subdivision after another.

To her friends, Lawrence seemed more inclined to get along than raise a ruckus. But the notion that she and her family might be driven out of town struck an angry chord.

"I'm not done with Mount Laurel," Lawrence said after church. Soon she joined forces with legal aid lawyers and the NAACP to sue the town. And quite unexpectedly, they won, sending shockwaves through New Jersey.

In its 1975 ruling, the New Jersey Supreme Court said Mount Laurel's exclusionary zoning was illegal, and that suburbs must change their laws to permit affordable housing. The decision was based on the state constitution, and immune from review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Suburbs balked. So the court issued a second decision in 1983, requiring each community to approve a specific number of affordable housing units.

These rulings went far beyond the experiences of California, Massachusetts and other states, which adopted purely advisory guidelines. If a New Jersey suburb failed to meet its obligations, developers could sue for the right to build affordable housing.

Local officials promised to block the rulings any way they could. The Legislature took control, passing laws that allowed many suburbs to skirt the requirement.

Some towns, for example, paid thousands of dollars to poorer cities to build the housing. Others raised taxes to buy up open space, and kept it off the market.