Michael A. Meloro Jr., ELR Staff ‘26

With increasing pressure on zoning mechanisms in suburbs and urban areas alike, some areas–such as Cambridge, Massachusetts–are doing away with single-family housing altogether.  However, the wholesale eradication of zoning can prove detrimental to the environment because many rural areas rely on zoning to promote agriculture and minimum lot sizes that prevent habitat fragmentation.  The United States is losing millions of acres of farmland each year, with an average of 4.3 acres per minute being removed from farm usage, often permanently.  The effects of urban sprawl also threaten wetlands, causing flooding and large wildfires.  

The zoning of Bedminster Township, New Jersey, which lies between metropolitan New York and the rural northwest of New Jersey, provides for a densified urban space in one part of the town and a 10 acre lot minimum agricultural land use corridor where farmers can raise cattle, horses, or crops in another.  As a result of this zoning, Bedminster Township is able to preserve its historic farming land use and limit urban sprawl while also providing a densified corridor in another part of town which has more housing and services.  This is important because it shows that the town is engaging with zoning to protect open space, rather than the exclusionary zoning practices which have attracted the attention of contemporary land use specialists.  Rather than zoning for racial quotas or keeping out poor people, zoning today can encompass common sense environmental concerns. 

Zoning critics may advocate for the creation of more public parks, but that alone will not stave off suburban sprawl.  New Jersey is home to over 400,000 acres of state-owned parks, supplemented by many county and municipal open space preserves, and National Wildlife Refuges such as the Great Swamp and Wallkill River.  Farmland is open space, but it is in a sense developed, since crop planting, crop rotations, and controlled grazing are overseen by farmers, rather than being natural.  However, agricultural land is not covered with impervious surfaces such as concrete or asphalt, and agricultural land can be rewilded and returned to nature while urban land cannot be.  This means that agricultural land can be entered into public park systems, which is not true for land that has been developed. 

Protecting agricultural land from urban sprawl and the densification of urban areas and suburbs require private landowners’ participation in a way that public parks cannot accommodate.  In addition to agricultural zoning practices, preserved farmland programs can serve to further land preservation to prevent urban sprawl.  Preserved farmland is a public-private partnership wherein landowners can sell development rights to the state of New Jersey, but still own their property.  This means the real estate still holds its value and is fungible on the real estate market, but when sold it cannot be subdivided to put tract homes and sprawl development.  New Jersey had about 712,000 acres of farmland as of 2024, down from about 734,000 in 2017.  However, in 2023 the state’s preserved farmland program reached 250,000 acres of privately held land that is protected from development.  New Jersey has actually led New York in housing production due to increased supply of affordable and market rate housing in its cities and inner ring suburbs.  This is in large part due to New Jersey’s affordable housing laws, which impose massive construction obligations on municipalities.  

Although this housing law, A4/S50 boosts urban and suburban housing production, it is a threat to the rural areas of New Jersey, which are not exempt from the obligations the bill imposes to construct new housing.  New Jersey has historically balanced incredible population density with open space, but the one size fits all methods of the affordable housing policy threaten the continued success of open space preservation.   As such, environmentalists should look to New Jersey as both an example for balancing environmental considerations and affordable housing, but also an incomplete project.  

Advocates for the newest law, A4/S50, such as Adam Gordon, the Fair Share Housing Center Executive Director, claim their focus is on building housing in urban areas with access to jobs and public transportation.  However, the Fair Share Housing Center instead targets rural municipalities like Burlington County’s Springfield Township with onerous construction obligations, such as the proposed DR Horton Project in Springfield Township to build over a thousand units in the middle of the preserved farmland corridor.  Springfield Township has only about 1,000 homes, so that project would have doubled the town’s population as soon as it opened.  Springfield does not have New Jersey transit rail service, and is miles away from Trenton, Philadelphia, or the north Jersey and New York job market; this municipality is also proximate to the Pine Barrens, one of the most important open spaces in New Jersey.  

This township prevailed in a court case against DR Horton last year, arguing that their municipality’s preserved farmland regime (6,000 acres in that town alone) and the lack of any infrastructure capable of handling thousands of new residents did not amount to exclusionary zoning; this is important because A4/S50 is meant to alleviate exclusionary zoning, not merely to spur development.  Burlington County Superior Court Judge Jeanne Covert agreed, finding the proposed site unsuitable for a massive development.  This disposition is important because it can serve as a starting point for discussion of how A4/S50 should be limited in its impacts on rural areas that are incapable of accommodating massive developments.  Providing new housing is important.  However, protecting rural land–especially in the country’s most densely populated state–should be prioritized before the last tree is felled.  New Jersey lawmakers should seek a balance to housing growth, focusing on urban and suburban areas instead of imposing housing quotas on farming towns, while stopping the assault on our robust preserved farmland and agricultural zoning system.