In the News

  • Mount Laurel Lives On

    New Jersey’s Mount Laurel Doctrine, originating in local exclusionary zoning, has again reach the state’s Supreme Court. PEL Reporter Stuart Meck shares the long and complicated history of the doctrine, its implementation through the Council on Affordable Housing, the council’s controversial changes to local affordable housing requirements, the state’s attempt to appropriate local housing trust funds, and Governor Christie’s attempts to dissolve the council.

    Published in American Planning Association’s Planning and Environmental Law on January 1st, 2014 | View PDF

  • Study Shows the Benefits of Affordable Housing: Guest Opinion

    As the issue of affordable housing has become increasingly contentious in New Jersey, Princeton University has published an especially timely book, Climbing Mount Laurel, which refutes the widespread belief that the expansion of affordable housing adversely affects communities where it happens, by increasing crime and other social costs while dragging down nearby property rates.

    Published in Star-Ledger on December 20th, 2013 | View PDF

  • Affordable Housing Advocates Score Victories in New Jersey

    In the decades-long battle to force more suburban New Jersey towns to make room for low-income residents, several recent developments are giving affordable housing advocates reason to smile.Since July, housing advocates have won three major battles in the state: a legal settlement in Mt. Holly, the elimination of loopholes for suburban communities dragging their feet on building cheaper housing, and the publication of a Princeton University study that suggests that a suburbanite’s worst fears of having low-income neighbors were overblown.

    Published in NewsWorks (WHYY) on December 5th, 2013 | View PDF

  • In Mount Laurel, Princeton University Professor Douglas Massey Finds Affordable-Housing Model

    Douglas Massey first learned about the fight over a proposed affordable-housing development in Mount Laurel, N.J., when he was a graduate student at Princeton University in the mid-1970s.
    Mount Laurel, a small town about 40 miles south of the Princeton campus, was in the midst of being transformed into a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia. Poor residents saw the proposed affordable-housing development as a way to ensure they could continue to live there as housing prices rose. Opponents feared the development would hurt property values, increase crime and lead to higher taxes. The dispute led to landmark New Jersey Supreme Court decisions in 1975 and 1983 that cleared the way for what would become the Ethel Lawrence Homes. By the time Massey returned to New Jersey to join the University’s faculty in 2003, the fight in Mount Laurel was over, but there were still no clear answers to the questions about the development’s impact on its residents and the surrounding community. Massey decided to embark on a study to answer those questions, the results of which have been published in the book, Climbing Mount Laurel.

    Published in “News at Princeton,” on Princeton University website on November 7th, 2013 | View PDF

  • Climbing Mount Laurel: An Interview with Douglas Massey

    Princeton University Professor Douglas Massey’s interview with B. Rose Huber describes what motivated Dr. Massey to conduct the research in the book Climbing Mount Laurel.

    Published in Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs “News,” on Princeton University website on October 31st, 2013 | View PDF

  • Here Comes the Neighborhood

    David Kirp’s op-ed talks about new research published in a book called Climbing Mount Laurel (Princeton University Press), which describes the benefits of the Mount Laurel Doctrine and offers praise for FSHD’s flagship development Ethel R. Lawrence Homes.

    Published in New York Times on October 19th, 2013 | View PDF

  • Just The Facts

    Climbing Mount Laurel is a scrupulously documented sociological study of the effects of adding a 140-apartment subsidized-housing complex to a suburban township of about 45,000 people.

    Published in Magazine of the American Planning Association on October 1st, 2013 | View PDF

  • Seven Books About Suburbia

    The fight against racism, suburban-style, blossoms in “Climbing Mount Laurel: The Struggle for Affordable Housing and Social Mobility in an American Suburb” (Princeton University Press, 2013). For years, locals protested hard that home values would fall and crime rates would rise. Douglas S. Massey and four other authors, most with Princeton ties, meticulously document how this wasn’t the case at all. The even bigger takeaway: those who moved into the Ethel Lawrence Homes—named for a Mount Laurel citizen known as “The Rosa Parks of affordable housing”—have gained so many advantages in health, education and stability, you want to weep for untold others, knowing what happens when an American Dream is deferred

    Published in Boston Globe on September 28th, 2013 | View PDF

  • Small Providers with Big Ideas

    Leading Age Magazine reports on a wellness program operating out of FSHD’s Northgate II in Camden which aims to create a service model that could be used with high-risk, high-needs elderly and other Medicaid users in other cities across the country. The report highlights “small providers with big ideas.”

    Published in Leading Age Magazine on September 11th, 2013 | View PDF

  • Setting Up Shop Where the Sick Are

    Nobody wants to be in the hospital, or the emergency room. With Obamacare, hospitals and doctors now have a financial incentive to keep patients, especially the chronically ill, from using the ER for their primary or preventive healthcare needs. Inside FSHD’s Northgate II, an affordable housing complex in Camden, NJ, there’s a small doctor’s office that could play a big role in lowering some of those unnecessary medical costs, and in improving care for some of the sickest and most expensive patients in the city.

    Published in NPR’s Marketplace on August 2nd, 2013 | View PDF