In partnership with the Rutgers Bloustein School's Voorhees Center for Civic Engagement and St. Joseph's Carpenter Society, a community development corporation in Camden, New Jersey, we sought to better understand home purchase and improvement lending in Camden between 2018 and 2022, a decade after the 2008 financial and liquidity crisis and the 2009 Great Recession significantly restricted credit access. We looked at patterns of home purchase and improvement mortgage originations, applications, and denials in Camden and found higher mortgage denial rates than elsewhere in the region, more expensive mortgages from the companies that have lower denial rates, and a critical gap in access to home repair loans. Our findings point to the prominent importance of non-depository mortgage companies in the provision of housing credit, raising concerns both about lender regulation and the need for greater bank presence in Camden's mortgage markets.

CLiME’s Guidance for Lawmakers on Investors and New Jersey Homes responds to the flood of proposed legislation in New Jersey to respond to the growth of institutional investors in single-family homes. This report describes the pending bills in New Jersey and offers expert recommendations on how legislators should understand the combined policy effects of a range of efforts, including bans, opportunity to purchase restrictions, tax strategies, and responses to various harms to renters through tenant-protection laws.

We offer four top level recommendations for New Jersey lawmakers:

1. Create an executive agency tasked with developing the infrastructure necessary to regulate institutional investors in single-family homes in New Jersey.

2. Prioritize a first-look law that mandates a wait period before investors may bid on a home once it goes on the market.

3. Impose limits on property-related tax deductions such as mortgage interest and depreciation to disincentivize investor ownership of single-family homes.

4. Prioritize various tenant protection bills aimed at responding to specific harms renters face from growing dominance of corporate landlords, including rapid rent increases, increased eviction actions, and habitability concerns.

This Update documents the Trump Administration's continued efforts to rewrite the meaning of racial equality in the United States. The administration’s efforts have kept pace with their first ten months, collected for CLiME’s November 2025 report presented as a four-pronged strategy aimed at: 

• Redefining race discrimination through a theory of antidiscrimination doctrine developed by the overwhelmingly white conservative legal movement, which has resisted racial progress through the courts since the at least the 1970s;

• Dismantling the federal institutions responsible for civil rights enforcement by eliminating people and offices committed to the work of restorative justice and racial equity and repopulating those spaces with a sparse few ideological loyalists who selectively enforce civil rights laws through this redefined, ahistorical understanding of antidiscrimination;

• Enforcing this colorblind, reverse-race discrimination ideology by weaponizing the federal checkbook to coerce institutions into ideological compliance and to defund any program or research that may document ongoing, system racial inequalities or support Black, Latino and Indigenous communities in any way; and

• White washing racial gerrymandering efforts through political gerrymandering, while the Court ends the Voting Rights Act as we know it by subverting claims of racial discrimination to achieve policy goals–the effects of which often involve civil rights retrenchment–all the while knowing that the Supreme Court is ideologically and doctrinally aligned.

CLiME’s inaugural evaluation of 12 of New Jersey’s most populous cities reveals striking trends that reverse many of the last century’s assumptions about life in the Garden State. Despite dynamic changes in urban-suburban demographics, housing and job growth, one overriding fact prevails: economic inequality has hardened between cities and suburbs and within and across cities. We looked at social and economic trends in the state’s 12 most populous cities – Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Hoboken, Union City, Hackensack, Asbury Park, New Brunswick, Trenton, Camden and Atlantic City – and found:

• Urban population growth and residential development now outpaces the rest of the state.

• The 12 cities are home to many working-class and immigrant residents, and more than half households struggle to make ends meet.

• The 12 cities are home to the state’s poorest children, with poverty rates as high as 48 percent.

• A lack of affordable housing is a problem statewide, but it’s especially pronounced in the gentrifying cities of the NY metro.

Read more to learn how these factors play out differently in different parts of the state and our recommendations for enhancing the economic prospects of New Jersey residents.

Can people sue federal agents for police brutality? In this memorandum, CLiME explores the very limited bases for finding ICE agents civilly liable for excessive force or deprivation of civil rights. The main issues involve: 

• restrictive federal legal standards and barriers to bringing a claim 

• unbridled and undue deference afforded to federal law enforcement agents on the job, and 

• underdeveloped state laws that have yet to provide legitimate alternatives to weak federal causes of action. 

Courts appear to be generally hostile to government liability and the costs of accountability against federal agents. As a result, unlike police brutality by state and local law enforcement, legal remedies against ICE and other federal law enforcement are largely unavailable. Some scholars have proposed ways to close this legal gap, so far without success.

Why is The “Rent So Damned High”? explores the drivers of high and rising rents and proposes a series of policies to address rental unaffordability in New Jersey and respond to changes at the federal level. Most experts say the chief explanation for high rents is an undersupply of housing and push a “build, build, build” strategy to bring rents down. Our findings challenge the consensus. Through a deep dive of academic and public research, we identified four primary drivers of high and rising rents: inflation, undersupply, widening inequality, and the consolidation and professionalization of landlords and real estate.

Federal policy is embracing building as the foremost solution to the affordability crisis. Trump’s Big Bill permanently expanded the country’s largest affordable housing production subsidy program, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). Meanwhile, deeper subsidy programs that can reach low-income renters are threatened with large cuts. To make housing affordable, we must also address stagnant incomes and the consolidation of homebuilders and landlords.

Diverging Dynamics: The 2023 Displacement Risk Indicators Matrix (D.R.I.M.) Update for Newark explores how the risk of displacement in Newark has changed since 2010. Newark is experiencing the steady erosion of affordability as rents rise faster than incomes. In this latest installment of CLiME’s displacement analysis, diverging patterns of urban change are becoming clearer across wards with uneven but unmistakable signs of gentrification.

The East and Central Wards saw the most dramatic increases in new construction activity, the most rapidly rising rents, and the most pronounced increases in residents who are college-educated and/or affluent renters. The West Ward also shows signs of elevated renter vulnerability, with large increases in medium household incomes alongside rising rent burdens. The North Ward has very different housing market dynamics, with large increases in homeownership and much less residential construction. The South Ward shows the greatest signs of tenant vulnerability but also has the most affordable rental stock, compared to other parts of the city.

The Other Cities: Migration and Gentrification in Jersey City, Newark and Paterson describes housing trends and neighborhood transitions in three mid-sized North Jersey cities that elude conventional descriptions of gentrification. All three have experienced population growth, increased immigration, loss of Black residents and a persistent lack of housing affordability. We describe their particular dynamics three ways: "Bedroom City", "Jobless Gentrification" and "Migrant Metro." Jersey City is the “Bedroom City” where population growth and higher prices are associated with its proximity to jobs across the Hudson River in New York City. Newark is in the midst of “Jobless Gentrification” where investment in expensive market-rate new housing and investor-led renovations raise prices without the corresponding job growth seen in traditional gentrification. Paterson is the “Migrant Metro”, a species of municipalities that have become mosaics of working-class immigration whose density alone—not jobs or new housing—has intensified a lack of affordability. These characteristics distinguish them from traditionally gentrifying cities, but their traits are important bellwethers of urban life across the U.S.

This report analyzes the compliance challenges public universities face since the issuance of several executive orders that threaten investigation and defunding for a broad range of activities associated with “DEI” and other undefined terms. In Part I, we examine the language of the federal directives in light of universities’ historic obligations and current circumstances. Many institutions have so far chosen some version of either pre-emptive obedience, wait-and-see inaction or offensive defiance. We suggest that institutions will face some combination of four possible courses of action: continue to obey civil rights law, anticipate new standards, manage risks and defend current practices.

Schools’ circumstances are not uniform. Yet all must conform to current legal standards, which are often inconsistent with the new federal policy directives. To clarify, this report sets out the existing state of the law since Students for Fair Admissions, including the scope and limitations of that Supreme Court decision, the continued allowance of race-neutral means to achieve racially diverse learning environments and the applicable tests used by the Court under Title VI. Since many organizations and institutions have already challenged the federal administration in court, we conclude with an analysis of the legal defenses—mostly on First Amendment grounds—that have so far succeeded in securing injunctions against certain banned practices. Part II of this report sets out best practices universities across the United States have used to stay in compliance with civil rights law yet still maintain environments that are diverse, inclusive and consistent with equitable principles.

Discussions about Vice President Kamala’ Harris’ record as a progressive prosecutor have offered an opportunity to consider what the next president could do to help spur equitable criminal justice reform. While recognizing that policing is largely a local endeavor, it is important to identify how the next president can leverage existing federal programs to contribute to larger criminal justice reform and equity efforts. In this paper we propose that the next administration restructure the Justice Assistance Grants (JAG) and Community-Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grants in order to support community-based criminal justice programs (CCJP) to achieve equitable criminal justice reform. These programs, which emphasize partnerships between law enforcement, prosecutors, and non-law enforcement organizations, aim to reduce crime and recidivism through rehabilitation, mental health services, and social support. The proposal we offer draws inspiration from Vice President Kamala Harris’s "Back on Track" program, which successfully helped first-time nonviolent offenders avoid incarceration through alternative sentencing that focuses on rehabilitation. The paper argues that similar programs, if federally supported, could help contribute to equitable criminal justice reform by fostering trust between law enforcement and communities, reducing police brutality while also preventing crime and recidivism.

On January 12, 2024, Governor Phil Murphy signed the Wealth Preservation Program law, an ambitious reorganization of the foreclosure process in favor of second chances, non-profit rights of second refusal and affordable home ownership. Then-Assemblywoman, now-Senator Britnee Timberlake, introduced this law because New Jersey has the highest foreclosure rate in the country, with one foreclosure for every 2,271 homes.[1] The potential impact of this law goes beyond just reducing the number of foreclosures. It potentially limits institutional investors’ opportunities to purchase foreclosed homes at sheriff’s sales by providing ordinary homebuyers initial opportunities to bid on properties on more favorable terms.  Under the Act, defaulting homeowners, their next of kin or tenants have the first chance to re-purchase their homes from sheriff sales at a publicly disclosed discount price by paying only a 3.5% down payment with 90 days to close.  If they do not elect to purchase, non-profit community development corporations (CDCs) have the next right of refusal in exchange for deed restrictions that keep the property affordable to subsequent owners or renters.

This is a report about how cities can better organize and manage their data about the property they own in order to promote transparency and advance critical policymaking. Newark, like many legacy cities, owns hundreds of parcels through tax foreclosure and abandonment that can be put to more productive use and even generate needed revenue. Because of different inputs from different departments, its property data system contained duplication and gaps that prevented policymakers and stakeholders from getting a clear picture of these public assets. In partnership with city staff, CLiME helped to resolve the data organization problem and set property management on a new, more accurate and user-friendly course. Along the way, we learned details about the nature and amount of city-owned properties, how they’re zoned and where they’re located. We concluded that much more of this significant inventory can and should be put to work advancing long-held goals of equitable development. We built three demonstrations to simulate this usage that cover three major areas of policy: affordable housing production, commercial and industrial development and green space/environmental risk mitigation. Each of these is an area in which the Baraka administration is already active in setting aggressive policies. Some of those policies already make use of the asset of city-owned land. Until recently, it was impossible to see the scope of particular uses because the data did not readily permit it. Now the data is cleaner and clearer.

Individual break-out reports from the full report are also available:

• Data Analysis of Newark’s City-Owned Property Inventory

• Simulation 1: Facilitate Development of 2,500 Units of Affordable Housing

• Simulation 2: Use commercially and industrially zoned land to fuel equitable development of jobs, businesses and placemaking

• Simulation 3: Transform abandoned spaces into green tools for climate resiliency and placemaking