Fostering Self-Sufficiency
Housing Alliance :: Press Releases

Secretary Moves to Millionaire Row – Harding Builds Affordable Housing
United Way of Morris County is committed to increasing the affordable housing supply in Morris County.  In 2005, United Way founded, and still administrates, the Housing Alliance to help address this critical issue.  We are pleased to present the following story on a new affordable housing complex, The Farm at Harding, as a shining example of what affordable housing can look like, and how affordable housing can become a reality with collaboration, leadership, and imagination. Click here for additional stories and pictures.

From the Star Ledger, Morris County section
By John Wihbey, Star Ledger staff

September 17, 2006 – Harding Township, NJ – Leslie Chapman got lucky.  She was one of the 24 people picked from the more than 300 applicants vying for one of the brand-new affordable housing units at The Farm at Harding.
 
It was a rare victory for a moderate-income worker in an increasingly difficult real estate market, county housing advocates say.
 
"I'm a secretary – I can't afford to live here," Chapman said as she moved her belongings into her new two-bedroom apartment, which looks out on a back yard of meadow and pristine forest.  "It is like winning the lottery."

Residents who live in one of The Farm's one-, two-, and three-bedroom units have salaries between $29,500 and $78,200, depending on family size.
 
Yet the homes are anything but simple.  The five-building complex has barn and carriage house features designed to blend with nearby estate homes.  It helps to redefine what "affordable housing" looks like – and dispel some of the stereotypes of ugly high-rises, officials, and advocates say.
 
"(Harding) set the bar pretty high, and I think that's a good thing," said John Franklin, CEO of United Way of Morris County, adding that towns sometimes display a "not-in-my-backyard" mentality about affordable housing.
 
Franklin puts the lesson simply:  "If Harding can do it, others towns can."
 
Franklin said it's not just immigrants and the working poor who can't live in the county.  It's seniors and moderate-income service, corporate workers and public employees, like Chapman.
 
A 43-year-old Chatham school district employee and single mother of two small children, Chapman had been living with her parents in Cranford, Union County, for more than two years as she sat on six affordable housing waiting lists.
 
Now Chapman's trip to work from her new Woodland Avenue apartment will be 10 minutes, compared with 40 stressful minutes before.  And she will have her own place in bucolic Harding, where houses are assessed on average at $1.2 million.
 
"It's awesome," she said.  "There have been tears of joy."
 
In 1996, Harding dispensed with some of its obligations under that sate Council on Affordable Housing by paying $860,000 to the city of Orange to pay for low-income housing.
 
But in 2004, partly out of good will by residents and partly to meet affordable housing obligations, the township coughed up $1million to buy the nine-acre parcel for The Farm.  Officials used volunteer help and also agreed to back a loan to a nonprofit develop and pay about $200,000 a year to subsidize The Farm's costs.
 
Harding Mayor John Murray said The Farm, which cost $4 million to build, provides more units than what was required.
 
"It's certainly not a model for everybody, but it really establishes an alternative for how towns can meet their COAH obligations.
 
The Farm, though, is only a small amount of relief for the county.  It provides only 24 units in a county where the median home selling price is more than a half-million dollars and there remains a severe affordable housing shortage, according to the Morris County Housing Alliance.
 
A 2005 county study found a shortage of more than 9,000 units affordable for low-income households earning less than $25,000 and moderate-income households earning up to $42,000.
 
Only about 5,200 of the county's 172,000 housing units are affordable for low to moderate-income workers, the study shows.
 
In the past two decades, affluent Morris County towns – include the Chathams, Denville, Long Hill, Mendham Township, Mountain Lakes and the Hanovers – also paid urban areas to meet state affordable housing obligations.  State data show county towns have sent more than $12 million for affordable housing out of the county.
 
Over the same 20 years, Morris County towns built or rehabilitated about 5,000 units for affordable housing.
 
Dan McQuire, of Homeless Solutions Inc. in Morris Township, said only a "handful" of towns will need to build more affordable housing in the next few years under state obligations.
 
It is difficult sometimes for towns to find available land and appropriate locations, and for them to swallow the reality of adding more kids to the school systems, officials say.  The Highlands Act and its restrictions make the task of affordable housing even more arduous.

The obligation, then, has fallen to nonprofit organizations to reach out to towns to spur more projects like The Farm, McGuire said.  Affordable Harding Corp., organized by Harding residents Philip and Mary Van Kirk, developed the new project there.
 
"All the funding sources are out there to do it," McGuire said.  Meeting COAH obligations is a "much more attractive" option than facing "builder's remedy" lawsuits – a court-sanctioned method by developers that results in large projects with small portions of affordable housing, McGuire said.
 
New U.S. Census Bureau numbers show that poverty is dropping in Morris County, but many observers believe that's because the few lower-income workers who reside here are leaving, or not even considering Morris County as a housing option.