New Jersey has a lesson for New York's housing crisis

See This Small New Jersey Town Became a Different Kind of Suburb by Binyamin Appelbaum of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"Palisades Park is one of the few places in the New York metropolitan area where it is legal to replace a single-family home with something other than another single-family home. Over the last few decades, developers have bulldozed many of the old houses and replaced them with bigger, fancier duplexes.

There have been some growing pains, but many more people are now able to live in Palisades Park. Since 1990, the population has increased by 40 percent. The main street has revived and flourished, becoming a destination for Korean food. And the growth has allowed Palisades Park to reduce its tax rates.

One of the most important causes of the region’s housing crisis is the dearth of construction in communities around New York City, where most residential land is reserved exclusively for single-family homes. It is illegal to build more housing on that land, and so it has become impossible to provide enough."

"Palisades Park shows that a little more density can deliver big benefits. A quirk in the town’s zoning code, which dates back to 1939, allows two homes on most residential lots — but no more than two. The reasons for that unusual provision are lost to history, and for a long time it didn’t really matter. But in the 1980s, Korean immigrants began moving to the area, and as demand increased, developers discovered that they could turn a single house into two homes.

The new duplexes are typically both more valuable than the homes they replace. That has allowed Palisades Park to cut property tax rates even as its budget has increased. In the early 2000s, Palisades Park and the adjacent town of Leonia, where it is illegal to build duplexes, both taxed homes at roughly the same rate. Last year, Palisades Park’s property tax rate was less than half of Leonia’s."

"One key benefit is that this kind of construction doesn’t require large-scale government coordination or investment.

“You don’t need a renewal plan,” said Mr. Pinto. [Edward Pinto, a co-director of the housing center at the American Enterprise Institute] “You don’t need subsidies. All you need is the right to build duplexes.” He added that if duplexes had been legal across northern New Jersey — not to mention suburban counties in New York and Connecticut — “we would be in a very different situation today.”"

"California passed a law in 2021 allowing the construction of up to four units on single-family lots, although local governments have found other ways to stymie development. California has been more successful in allowing homeowners to add an apartment to any residential property. More than 80,000 of these “accessory dwelling units” have been permitted since 2016."

"A few years ago, Halyna Lemekh, a professor of sociology at St. Francis College who has lived in Palisades Park for two decades, decided to study her own community, interviewing dozens of residents about its transformation. “Many people expressed their resentment that it became a citylike place with less greenery,” she said. “This wasn’t just a face lift. It’s a very different place from what they knew as children.” 

But Ms. Lemekh also found that the current residents of Palisades Park are generally pretty happy to be living there. And the important point is that more people are now able to live there.

New York and New Jersey should end single-family zoning so more people can build the communities they want and need."