Good things can happen when the cycle of racial isolation is broken. An encouraging example can be found in the southern New Jersey suburb of Mount Laurel, where zoning policies that once excluded black and lower-income families were the target of a major lawsuit nearly a half century ago. In rulings handed down in 1975 and 1983, the New Jersey Supreme Court told Mount Laurel and other suburbs that they could no longer exclude affordable housing and were required to rewrite zoning laws to make such housing possible.
The Mount Laurel remedy had a difficult birth and still draws fire today. Some local officials are working diligently to turn back the clock to a time when poor and minority citizens had no choice but to live walled off in ghettos that stunted their lives and the lives of their children. Gov. Chris Christie and his allies in some of the state’s wealthy towns would like nothing more than to kill this remedy.
But much good has flowed from the court’s decisions. Once-segregated areas are now more diverse. And more than 60,000 homes have been built for low- and moderate-income families in the New Jersey suburbs, giving such families access to solid jobs and starter homes.
Critics would do well to study Mount Laurel itself, where an affordable housing development that opened in 2000 has yielded benefits that have been chronicled in a study led by the Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey. The study, recounted in the book “Climbing Mount Laurel,” shows that an attractive, well-maintained affordable housing development in an affluent neighborhood can improve the lives of struggling families without jeopardizing local property values, precipitating more crime or becoming an economic burden on the community.
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