New Jersey homeowners are sinking in monthly bills. In this brief, we explore the sky-high and rapidly rising costs of being a homeowner in New Jersey. This includes both mortgage and non-mortgage housing costs. New Jersey has the property taxes, and among the most expensive housing prices in the country. In addition, New Jersey homeowners pay 20 percent more in utility costs than the national average, and are now facing soaring electricity bills related to supply challenges and the new demands of AI data centers. New Jersey’s homeowners’ insurance premiums are also going up much faster than other states, related to private companies’ responses to more extreme weather and construction and labor costs. As these various costs add up, more homeowners – especially those with lower incomes – are sinking into debt and many are deferring home repairs and maintenance.

In New Jersey, new construction is exempt from price controls for 30 years, even in municipalities with rent control ordinances. Given the other exemptions available to developers, it is questionable whether this exemption is necessary to spur new construction. This memo examines that question by laying out the history of rent control in New Jersey as well as the history of the new construction exemption, looking at case law involving the exemption as well as arguments for the exemption and critique of those arguments, and proposes alternatives to the exemption as either an abolishment or revision of the exemption. The history shows how the moderate nature of rent control in New Jersey suggests that its effect on new construction is overblown, the legislative intent was more about removing barriers to new construction without considering any balance with the prevention of rent gouging, rent control is relevant towards new construction, and significant revision, if not abolishment, of the exemption would have a beneficial effect for existing affordable housing.

Urban renewal, a mid-century federal-local redevelopment program that transformed American cities and displaced millions of Black migrants from the South, was a race-conscious government policy responsible for the enduring suppression of Black wealth. Its racial history and character are untold in legal scholarship. This Article argues that the 25-year regime enacted in the Housing Act of 1949 was a response to the Great Migration of Black workers and families to northern, midwestern, and western cities. It was codified to interact with other segregation policies, such as highway construction, restrictive covenants, redlining, and public housing through the colorblind veneer of rational planning principles. Race planning created durable conditions of “racial bargaining,” the discounted value of wealth-producing transactions in segregated Black communities. Since its mid-century enactment, urban renewal federalized a race-conscious segregation policy that eluded civil rights remedies and framed contemporary urban development programs. This Article shows how this framework sustained the racial wealth gap at the core of this country’s continuing struggle with structural inequality.