New Jersey can’t build fast enough. It has to change | Opinion
It takes far too long in New Jersey to get things done. Let's fix the barriers that slow our growth.
Matt Hale, Allison McLeod and Ed Lee
A councilperson, a builder and a climate advocate walk into a byline — and no, it isn’t a joke. The three of us don’t agree on everything. In fact, you’ll find us at odds just as often as on the same side of the table. One of us has spent a career protecting the environment and fighting for clean energy. One of us has spent a career getting things built — homes, schools, infrastructure — focusing on good jobs and finishing projects. The third is a local elected official trying to get things done. We just look at things differently.
But on one thing we all agree: It takes far too long in New Jersey to get things done. The same broken process that blocks critical housing projects also blocks dam removals. Whether you are trying to create new energy projects or build more affordable housing, the answer from Trenton and town hall feels the same: wait.
New Jerseyans are paying for those wait times with some of the highest electricity bills and some of the highest housing costs in the country. Polls show, and politicians know, that people are begging for change to make life more affordable. Whether it's energy or housing, creating more supply can make that happen.
New Jersey's regulatory systems aren't equipped for modern demands
But our state and local systems just weren’t built, no pun intended, for a 21st-century world. Even projects meant to advance environmental protection, from land conservation to accessible trails to coastal resilience projects, can get caught up in years of delays and paperwork. Court-ordered affordable housing projects are delayed for over a decade in pursuit of complex, ever-evolving state and local permits.
None of this means regulations are bad. They aren’t. Clean water rules exist because rivers used to catch fire. Flood rules exist to protect lives and property. Localities should have a voice in zoning, planning and code protections. All three of us want those protections — in fact, we need them. The problem isn’t that New Jersey reviews projects. It’s that review has become an end in itself: process piled on process, agency after agency, lawsuit after lawsuit, year after year, until the things the rules were meant to deliver — affordable energy and affordable homes — never come to fruition.
We’ve built a system obsessed with process over outcomes, where in the day-to-day of meeting permit standards, we lose sight of the very things we are trying to protect. Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s own executive order on energy concedes the point: Nimble solar and storage projects, it says, “still face significant delays in permitting, siting, and interconnection.”
Fixing this system is not a betrayal of our values, but a precondition for achieving them. You cannot use new power-generating facilities if you can’t build them. You can’t live in more affordable housing unless construction workers can build them. Scarcity has a price: When the state can’t add generation, power gets more expensive; when it can’t add homes, rents climb out of reach. New Jersey is short more than 200,000 homes for the same reason it struggles to add a megawatt of power: It is simply too hard to build here. Affordability is not a separate problem from the permitting problem. It is the permitting problem.
To her credit, Sherrill sees this. She has framed her permitting agenda and her energy and housing agendas as matters of affordability. Her administration launched a public dashboard so applicants can see where projects are stuck, she created cross-agency teams so reviews can run in parallel rather than in sequence, and she ordered every agency to review its own rules. She has taken similar steps to increase our ability to create more energy and houses.
There's still more work to be done to speed projects in New Jersey
These are real changes that deserve support, but there is still more to do. It will require us all to shift from commitment to process to commitment to the public, the goal we know all state and local employees — whose hands are often tied by the same processes — share.
Major projects should have centralized reviewers and, provided the applications are complete, hard internal deadlines. No one is advocating rushing through poorly planned projects, but statewide standards for siting energy projects will give guidance and will streamline local approvals, too. The Board of Public Utilities can impose firm interconnection timelines on utilities, and an expansion of permit-by-rule approvals will let routine clean-energy installations — rooftop solar, home battery storage — clear in days, not months. And the Legislature can give court-ordered and approved affordable housing a path through local zoning and planning boards, so new affordable housing takes months, not decades.
The three of us will keep arguing about what New Jersey should build, but we all agree we should change the process for building. When supply goes up, cost goes down, and that is how New Jersey gets more affordable housing, good jobs, natural resource protection and more energy. And on that, the climate advocate, the builder and the councilman all agree.
Matt Hale is a Borough Council member in Highland Park, where he chairs the economic development committee; he is also an associate professor of political science at Seton Hall University. Allison McLeod is the interim executive director of New Jersey League of Conservation Voters, which advocates for policies and legislation to protect clean air, safeguard clean water and ensure equitable access to preserved open spaces and parks. Ed Lee is president of Simpson & Brown Construction and a board and executive committee member of the Associated Construction Contractors of New Jersey.