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Jack Ciattarelli wants to gut NJ’s affordable housing laws. Can he do it?
By
Mike Hayes
Published Oct 6, 2025
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By
Mike Hayes
Published Oct 6, 2025
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“Overdevelopment” is a common refrain whenever Jack Ciattarelli gets in front of voters. During his first debate with Rep. Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic nominee in the New Jersey governor's race, he spoke of “an overdevelopment crisis.”
“We’re taking the ‘garden’ right out of the Garden State,” the former Republican state assemblymember told the audience.
Days earlier in the town of Roxbury, he promised a fired-up crowd of supporters he’d “stop the overdevelopment of our suburban communities.”
The target of Ciattarelli’s ire is the Mount Laurel Doctrine, a 50-year-old constitutional mandate handed down by the state’s Supreme Court that requires all of New Jersey’s 564 municipalities to develop their “fair share” of affordable homes.
While housing advocates see the doctrine as a tool for expanding the availability of low-priced housing in one of the most expensive states in the country, some suburban residents and town officials resent the requirement, arguing it’s gobbling up an increasingly scant amount of open land.
If elected, Ciattarelli promised he would file a lawsuit to overturn the doctrine on “Day One,” and that he would appoint state Supreme Court justices who agree with his position.
But many local officials and legal experts question whether his campaign pledge is feasible. Since 1975, the mandate has survived multiple legal challenges and been reaffirmed by the courts. It’s also been codified into state law twice, most recently in 2024 when the Legislature passed a new affordable housing law aimed at building roughly 80,000 new low-priced housing units over the next decade.
“It would be hard to find more bedrock principles in New Jersey law,” said David Troutt, a Rutgers Law School professor who directs the school's Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity.
Others expressed concern over Ciattarelli’s plan to stack the court in his favor on a single issue, saying it would break with a long-standing precedent when governors appoint judges.
“It’s not codified, but it’s [an] understanding that we will have a balanced court,” said Bob Conley, a Democrat who’s served as the mayor of Madison since 2012. “If his plan were to attack a court to get rid of the doctrine, that would be wrong in so many different ways.”
“Mount Laurel has to go”
Ciattarelli’s battle cry against overdevelopment resonates in leafy, suburban towns like Montvale — home to fewer than 9,000 people — on the border with New York’s Rockland County.
Since September last year, Mayor Mike Ghassali has led a lawsuit, joined by 26 other towns, to overturn the 2024 law that lays out affordable housing requirements. Montvale is currently required to build 205 affordable units by 2035.
A state judge dismissed the lawsuit last week after the towns lost multiple attempts to have the law put on hold.
They're forcing towns to keep building.
Tyler Simpson, Stanhope resident
Ghassali vowed to appeal the ruling, and he supports Ciattarelli’s stance. He argues that mandates to build affordable housing place undue strain on small, residential communities’ roads, schools and sewers — all complaints echoed in the Republican's campaign platform.
“Tell me what's pro-environment about making every single one of our 564 towns build more apartments, high-density housing everywhere, causing all kinds of stormwater management problems," Ciattarelli said in Roxbury. "This is wrong. It needs to end. Mount Laurel has to go.”
The nominee has also said the policy overly focuses on rental units and does little to foster homeownership. Instead, he’s proposed to concentrate affordable housing in New Jersey's urban centers where there’s existing infrastructure and access to mass transit.
Tyler Simpson, a Stanhope resident who came to hear Ciattarelli speak in Roxbury, said affordable housing was one of his key election issues and he’d like to see Ciattarelli reverse Mount Laurel.
“There's a lot of mandates going around where a lot of towns here, Roxbury, Stanhope, where they're forcing towns to keep building up when there's really limited room to do so,” he said.
Mark Taylor, a Roxbury resident who also attended the rally, said he was still on the fence about whom to vote for, but he, too, liked Ciattarelli’s proposal to scrap the doctrine.
“Overall it has not been favorable to the people that it was supposed to, but I'd like to see what it would be replaced with,” Taylor said.
If Ciattarelli is elected, there’s little he could do legislatively, as he'd still face Democratic control in the state Senate and Assembly. That leaves him to try his luck with the courts. Ciattarelli said he’d instruct his attorney general to challenge the Mount Laurel Doctrine, but as Ghassali’s long and so far unsuccessful legal battle shows, the courts pose their own obstacle.
“You don't walk into the Supreme Court and ask them to change 40 years of jurisprudence,” said Richard Hoff, an attorney at Bisgaier Hoff who frequently represents developers around the state in land-use and affordable-housing cases.
Hoff said Mount Laurel has already survived several legal challenges, including in 2017, when the state Supreme Court ruled that towns would be responsible for housing requirements handed down during a 15-year gap — starting in 2000 — where state officials failed to enforce the rules at the direction of then-Republican Gov. Chris Christie.
“I don't know what could be done by way of another case that would reach a differing view of the New Jersey constitution, because that's where the doctrine originates,” Hoff said.
Jack Ciattarelli speaks with Camden residents.
Mike Hayes
The next governor will have the opportunity to replace at least two justices when their terms end or they reach the age for mandatory retirement at 70 years old. And as Ciattarelli has crisscrossed the state in recent months, he’s said he’d appoint Supreme Court justices who agree with him on overturning Mount Laurel.
“We're going before the state Supreme Court, and know this: If that court doesn't agree with me … all is not lost. As your next governor, I get two new Supreme Court state justices,” he told a crowd in September.
Troutt, the Rutgers professor, said this would be a departure from past appointments, which he said have avoided being “infected with blatant politics the way we've seen it in other places.”
“It would be a shame to begin a political tradition of heavily politicizing appointments by subjecting prospective justices to specific political litmus tests,” he said.
There, too, Ciattarelli would face the state Legislature. Justices must be confirmed by the state Senate, where Democrats currently hold a healthy majority. In light of that political reality, New Jersey housing attorney Kevin Moore said the idea that Ciattarelli could appoint judges to help him overturn Mount Laurel is “a theoretical possibility, but not necessarily a practical one.”
Affordable housing plans already underway
Sherrill, the Democratic nominee, has been cautious with her comments on the state’s affordable housing requirements.
In a statement to Gothamist, she called Ciattarelli's pledge to upend a half-century of precedent “an impossible plan that will do nothing to address housing costs.” But she did not directly address how she would approach the requirements as governor.
Instead, she said she’s in favor of expanding first-time homebuyer assistance; supporting the conversion of underutilized, vacant or neglected properties into housing to increase supply; and continuing to invest in the state’s affordable house trust fund that provides financing for developments. Current Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, has diverted funding out of the trust fund multiple times.
I hope we can avoid making housing affordability a partisan issue.
Mia Sacks, Princeton town council president
Ciattarelli’s calls for ending Mount Laurel come as most New Jersey municipalities are working to meet the law’s requirements to develop new affordable housing in what is now the doctrine’s fourth 10-year round.
“The majority of towns in New Jersey filed our Fair Share Plans in June and will be adopting the final ordinances by March, so it seems unlikely that changes to Mount Laurel would happen in time to significantly impact the fourth round,” said Mia Sacks, the president of Princeton's town council.
In June, the council unanimously approved a plan to add more than 200 affordable units across 13 sites.
“In a moment of extreme political polarization, I hope we can avoid making housing affordability a partisan issue," Sacks said. "Both parties agree that rising housing costs are fueled by inadequate supply."
Conley, the mayor of Madison, which is required to build 206 affordable units, said losing the doctrine would be taking “a big step backwards” on all the work done by towns like his.
“If you don't have Mount Laurel hanging over our heads to make sure we do something, the affordability in New Jersey is just going to get much worse,” he said.
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Mike Hayes
Mike Hayes covers equity and access to opportunity in New Jersey. He joined WNYC and Gothamist in 2023. Before that, he worked as a freelance journalist writing about policing and criminal justice. He has written for ProPublica, CNN, HuffPost, BuzzFeed News and The Appeal. He is also the author of the book, “The Secret Files: Bill De Blasio, The NYPD, and the Broken Promises of Police Reform.” In 2019, he was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists.
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