- September 19, 2026
- William Michelson
New Jersey’s Local Redevelopment & Housing Law (LHRL), N.J.S.A. 40A:12A-1 et seq., is a useful tool provided to municipalities in certain situations involving “blighted” and distressed properties and areas. Enacted in 1992, but preceded by less comprehensive statutes, it allows towns to bolster development by assembling parcels of land for sale to developers, demolishing or clearing what was there, sidestepping regular local zoning, and entering into agreements for favorable treatment. It permits the use of eminent domain to acquire properties, though most have been acquired voluntarily, and towns have usually not exercised this power. Sometimes it has also been applied to completely undeveloped properties such as wetlands.
It is not surprising then that sometimes the Redevelopment Plan process has been used, or at least proposed, for properties with historic and cultural significance that are in the way of someone’s planned development. The Act does not in itself address historic preservation. It encourages the development of affordable housing, though it is more often used for commercial and industrial purposes.
The redevelopment process begins when a municipal council, usually at the request of the mayor, asks the Planning Board to study and determine whether the properties are “in need of redevelopment,” a legal term of art. The Planning Board retains a planner and often an engineer to do the study, and then answers yes or no – but the latter outcomes are not very common. An ordinance is then drawn up to include all the planning and zoning provisions which the planner and board deem appropriate, and the council enacts it as an amendment to its Land Use Ordinance. A contract is then entered into between the municipality and a person or entity acting as “redeveloper,” and permits are issued for demolition and construction.
A recent court case, which does not actually involve historic properties, illustrates the problems inherent in this process. In Meerzon v. City of Perth Amboy, decided March 2, 2026, Middlesex County Superior Court Judge Benjamin S. Bucca, Jr. invalidated a Redevelopment Plan because a small apartment house and adjacent automobile business were not “blighted,” though the Planning Board claimed they were. The problem was in the findings of fact about the properties. In this case, part of the land in question was owned by the City, but not the rest , yet the City contended its partial ownership was sufficient to take the rest as well. Citing a 1998 case, the Judge noted that:
“The statutory language mandates that in order to designate land owned
by a municipality to be an area in need of redevelopment, there must be
a finding that the tract, by reason of location, remoteness, lack of means
of access to developed sections or portions of the municipality or topography
or nature of its soil, is not likely to be developed through the instrumentality of private capital. Ownership of the tract by the municipality is not, standing
alone, sufficient to support a redevelopment designation.”
A different section of the Act applies to privately owned properties. It addresses:
“Areas with buildings or improvements which, by reason of dilapidation, obsolescence, overcrowding, faulty arrangement or design, lack of
ventilation, light and sanitary facilities, excessive land coverage, deleterious
land use or obsolete layout, or any combination of these or other factors,
are detrimental to the safety, health, morals, or welfare of the community.”
The two buildings in question in Meerzon v. City of Perth Amboy may be old and tired, with no lawn or other open space, and rather obsolete in modern eyes, but the Judge determined that this was not enough to find any sort of harm to the community. The planner’s report had cited the presence of litter and refuse, a number of police calls over time, impervious surface coverage, and “allegedly faulty arrangement and design”. This is exactly the kind of vague allegation that planners and developers routinely make, because they want redevelopment. The Judge noted that observing litter once or twice does not mean much, and that the cited police calls did not even involve these two properties.
Perth Amboy had also argued the fashionable concept of “smart growth principles”—amorphous buzzwords used mostly by politicians—should guide the analysis. This refers to the idea that development should occur mostly in places where it already exists and can use existing infrastructure. The City’s most reasonable justification was that these properties were not likely to be redeveloped by the private market alone, and that the City should acquire and assemble the lots to facilitate and attract private capital. Here, Judge Bucca noted that the planner was not an expert in real estate or finance, and was therefore not worthy of belief about the unlikelihood that anyone would want to build there.
Along these lines, two New Jersey Supreme Court cases, Malanga v. Twp. of West Orange and Gallenthin Realty v. Borough of Paulsboro, have cautioned Planning Boards against the planner or other expert witness at its hearings being too willing to employ facile platitudes to justify the legal conclusion that the properties are “in need of redevelopment.”
In considering old buildings, however, one person’s tired old eyesore may be another person’s historically significant property, rundown as it may be. Not everyone appreciates old things and perceptions of a property as needing “development” can be a matter of subjective tastes. Historic preservation advocacy has to make the case that with conservation and restoration, such structures are part of the property’s value—value that will be lost with demolition.
An interesting conflict was illustrated another Preservation Bites article on a property in Plainfield, which was vacant because of fires that destroyed three old houses in the 1970s. The City’s desire to have something built there, which will pay property tax and fill an ugly hole in an otherwise intact historic street, clashed with the low density required in the historic district by its Zoning Ordinance. Its Planning Board and City Council were swayed by the need to create enough apartment units to satisfy the builder who was interested in these properties, so they made it a Redevelopment Area.
One of the key parts of the LRHL is the Redevelopment Plan should set forth all the usual bulk requirements and planning details, which will then supersede the local zoning altogether. But this can amount to “spot zoning,” in which a property will have its own rules, and not have to be compatible with the neighborhood or with the Master Plan. Plainfield’s response, when its Historic Preservation Commission tried to lessen the number of apartments planned for this location, was to take away the Commission’s jurisdiction when a Redevelopment Area is created within a Historic District. People who appreciate historic and cultural values need to be on the lookout for local politicians and boards which are more interested in development than in preservation. It is possible to balance these goals with the reality that builders cannot easily be found for projects that are just too small for their financial models. The kind of disputes described above in Perth Amboy and Plainfield have been happening all around the state, sometimes with historic properties, as there is great resistance in some towns to the New Jersey Supreme Court’s guidance about proper use of the LRHL.
