Gov. Sherrill Signs Executive Order to Boost NJ Housing

Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed an executive order Monday aimed at tackling New Jersey’s housing affordability crisis, setting deadlines as tight as 45 days for state agencies to start moving on new construction.

Home prices in New Jersey have climbed roughly 60 percent over the past five years, squeezing out first-time buyers and longtime residents alike. Sherrill said the message she kept hearing while campaigning last fall was blunt: “I don’t know how I can afford to stay here.”

That line drove the order.

The plan centers on three cascading deadlines. By June 11, the governor’s office convenes the Housing Governing Council. By June 27, all state agencies and authorities must submit written housing affordability reports identifying immediate actions to speed up construction, cut red tape, and remove unnecessary regulatory barriers. By September 24, the council must issue formal recommendations covering five areas: defining housing goals, tracking and accelerating production, developing surplus state property, coordinating financing, and inventorying access to affordable units.

Sherrill called it the “most aggressive” housing plan in the nation.

The use of vacant state-owned land is central to making the timeline work. Repurposing property the state already controls sidesteps the slow acquisition process that has stalled housing projects in municipalities across Bergen, Middlesex, and Ocean counties for years.

Land owned by NJ Transit gets particular attention. Transit-adjacent parcels could support new housing near train stations on the Northeast Corridor and other lines, a setup that’s proven popular with buyers and renters who commute into New York or Philadelphia. Given NJ Transit’s sprawling footprint across the state, that pool of available land is substantial.

The order calls for mixed-price housing, working on the basic economic logic that increasing overall supply puts downward pressure on costs at every level of the market.

Assemblyman Louis Greenwald, whose South Jersey district borders some of the state’s most distressed urban communities, said the state-land strategy would directly help cities that have long struggled to attract private development. “Using state land would particularly help build homes in such urban areas as Atlantic City, Camden and Trenton,” Greenwald said.

Those three cities share a common profile: significant vacancy, underused parcels, and residents who can’t absorb continued rent increases. State land, freed from the private acquisition process, could bring projects there faster than conventional development timelines allow.

InsiderNJ reported the order’s full breakdown, including the five-point mandate the Housing Governing Council must address before the September deadline.

Whether the council’s September recommendations carry legal weight or simply inform future legislation isn’t spelled out in the order’s public summary. What is spelled out: every state agency, including independent authorities, has to file a written report within 60 days. That paper trail creates accountability, or at least a record, for where the bottlenecks are.

New Jersey’s Office of Planning Advocacy has documented how exclusionary zoning in dozens of municipalities has suppressed housing supply for decades. The state’s Council on Affordable Housing has been a source of litigation and stalled obligations in towns that would rather pay fines than build. Sherrill’s order doesn’t directly override those local fights, but directing agencies to “remove unnecessary regulatory barriers” and increase transparency at the state level gives her administration a framework to apply political pressure on the slowest-moving jurisdictions.

The housing crisis cuts across every region. In Central Jersey, Edison and New Brunswick have seen rents rise sharply as demand from pharma and university workers outpaces supply. Down the Shore, seasonal property conversions have left year-round residents competing for a shrinking pool of rentals in Toms River and Asbury Park. In South Jersey, the problem is the opposite: vacancy and disinvestment in cities that need residents, not fewer of them.

Sherrill’s order tries to address all of it under one framework. The June and September deadlines will tell a lot about whether that framework has teeth. Greenwald said he believes the state-land approach gives the plan its best chance of producing real units, not just reports.