Unaffordable Housing

And you wanted to know why taxes, especially property taxes, continue to mushroom?

The Ledger recently brought word of a state/federal project to create or remodel 872 low and moderate income housing units in several urban areas. The total price tag: $217,013,328. OK, let’s do a little math, shall we? That’s almost a quarter million for EACH unit. (And of those, 120 units are merely being remodeled.)

Now, Hizzonor tells us that he wants to construct 100,000 units of such housing throughout the State in the near future. Leave aside the massive sprawl associated therewith; the cost of those units, apparently, approaches $25 billion. The State, as Paul Mulshine so eloquently observed, "has no dough" so it goosed the obligation to construct those units off onto suburban towns. Those towns possess essentially one source of revenue: property taxes. $25 billion exceeds the total annual property tax collection in the entire state.

Not to fear, we’re told; the recently imposed 2.5% tax on non-residential development will fund such projects. And it will ... assuming that someone undertakes $1 trillion worth of non-residential construction over the course of the next few years. That’s a lot of Xanadus.

So, if the provisions of the recently adopted A-500 are assumed to be coterminous with the COAH-Corzine proposal to construct 100,000-110,000 units of new low and moderate income housing, suburban taxpayers will need to pony up $25 billion, less whatever the beneficiaries expend which, in the case of Very Low income folks, to which much of this housing is to be directed, will be essentially nothing.

That figure, of course, merely encompasses constructing the units themselves. It fails to consider the roads, sewers, and schools serving that many new units will require, together with the vast horde of new public employees necessary to provide services thereto. The property tax hit will be enormous.

And just where are all the folks to take these units to come from? NJ is steadily losing productive citizens, at a 100,000 per year clip. Do we intend to empty our cities entirely, or are we emptying other countries, subsidizing the influx of impecunious immigrants at huge taxpayer expense?

After the budget process concluded, the Democrats crowed that it contained no "Christmas Tree" items, aka pork, and many members of the media, either complicit or credulous, toed the Party Line. Meanwhile, Hizzonor clucked sympathetically while slashing municipal aid to smaller, well-run municipalities, contending that the budget could not be balanced unless these smaller towns somehow got by with less.

Actually, such cuts make sense. We elect local officials to balance desires for local services against the impact of same upon the local taxpayers. Municipalities ought to receive nothing in state aid. The costs of hiring that extra cop in Somerville ought to be borne, wholly, by local residents.

But, apparently, that obligation only extends to Republican suburbs. Badly run, profligate – and, unsurprisingly, Democratically run – towns receive a windfall. The media now reports that 6 so-called distressed cities will divvy up $127 million in pork ... er, extraordinary municipal aid, all designed to insulate them from making precisely the same sort of painful decisions confronting their suburban counterparts.

No pork? Puh-leeze.

So, while imposing a tremendous tax burden on the suburbs, the present Administration and the present Democratic Majority continue to lavish pork on Democratic towns, protecting the residents from the consequences of foolish local electoral decisions.

Or, actually, inspired electoral decisions. As long as folks like Mayor-Senator Brian Stack continue to bring home the bacon – to the tune of $12.5 million of other people’s money, on top of already lavish subsidies paid for by suburban taxpayers for local schools and other municipal aid – it would require almost God-like virtue on the part of the local electorate to turn such a pig-farmer out of office.

Conversely, until such time as the State imposes precisely the same discipline on Union City as it imposes on Morris Township, taxes and spending will continue to balloon.