At the 2025 New Jersey Planning and Redevelopment Conference, hosted in partnership by New Jersey Future and the New Jersey Chapter of the American Planning Association, Beth Osborne—Interim President and CEO of Smart Growth America—delivered a keynote that challenged and inspired. In front of a packed audience of planners, community advocates, and developers, Osborne made one thing clear: transformative change starts locally.
Local Planning
Planning with Purpose: Beth Osborne Calls for Local Leadership and Smart Coalitions
Tuesday, July 1st, 2025Building the Future: Actions to Achieve Great Homes and Neighborhoods in New Jersey and Beyond
Monday, June 30th, 2025New Jersey is amidst a deepening housing crisis—particularly an affordability crisis. In all corners of the state, longtime residents are being priced out of their homes as housing costs soar. In fact, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, New Jersey has a shortage of over 200,000 housing units for low-income residents. Newark now ranks as the most difficult city in the United States to find a rental property. More than one-third of New Jersey residents are cost-burdened, meaning that they spend more than 30% of their income on housing. These statistics make one thing clear: New Jersey’s housing crisis cannot be ignored.
“A Historically High Level of Compliance:” New Jersey Towns Are Making Progress in Meeting Their Affordable Housing Targets
Monday, June 30th, 2025New Jersey’s high housing costs make life difficult for everyone, especially individuals and households at the lower end of the income spectrum. New Jersey’s Mount Laurel doctrine addresses the need for housing for lower-income households. The process by which towns satisfy their affordable housing obligations was recently updated with the passage of new legislation (now colloquially referred to as A4/S50), which established a formal methodology for determining municipal obligations and laid out a timeline of compliance for municipalities to follow.
Debt is Not a Bad Word: Funding New Jersey’s Infrastructure through Smart Financing
Tuesday, February 18th, 2025Municipalities face a tricky balancing act when it comes to infrastructure improvements: they need to address large, costly projects but have limited resources to fund them. Historically, issuing debt has been the primary means that municipalities are left with to finance critical improvements. However, municipal leaders are reluctant to be the ones responsible for issuing debt, while utilities and public systems are often hesitant to raise rates to cover project costs.
Promoting Integration at the Local Level
Thursday, July 20th, 2023While New Jersey is one of the most diverse states in the nation at the macro level, at the local level it is also one of the most segregated. The state has grown more demographically diverse over the last two decades, but most of its individual towns and neighborhoods are either predominantly white or predominantly non-white, with few places occupying the “diverse” range in between.
New NJF Report Explores How to Promote Racial Integration in NJ Municipalities
Thursday, September 22nd, 2022New Jersey is paradoxically one of the most diverse and most segregated states in the nation. The state has grown more diverse over the last two decades, with its non-Hispanic white percentage shrinking from two-thirds of the state population in 2000 to a little more than half as of the 2020 Census, with notable proportional growth among Hispanic and Asian-American communities. But New Jersey’s macro-level diversity often does not translate into integration at the local level, and places that are integrated at the local level don’t always stay that way.
Single-Family Zoning: An Idea Whose Time Has Passed?
Monday, April 12th, 2021New Jersey should follow Oregon’s and California’s lead and take advantage of the growing national momentum toward zoning reform, to at least begin a discussion about how such reforms might work in New Jersey.
Visualizing an Aging-Friendly Built Environment for Implementation in Ridgewood Village
Tuesday, November 10th, 2020New Jersey Future partnered with the Village of Ridgewood to develop an aging-friendly land use implementation plan, and now a graduate design studio class at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University is helping to move it along.
Where does impervious cover have the biggest impact?
Monday, November 11th, 2019The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) recently released a 2015 update of its land use / land cover data set. The LU/LC dataset offers a periodic snapshot of how and where New Jersey both uses and preserves its land.
Local Implementation Planning in Ridgewood Village Will Help Create Great Places to Age in New Jersey
Monday, October 14th, 2019New Jersey Future recently facilitated an implementation workshop in collaboration with aging-friendly coordinators from Westwood Borough, Teaneck Township and Ridgewood Village.