- [T]he fear of more children coming into a community is a mainstay at new housing proposal hearings. Particularly in high-cost suburbs along the coasts, the mere inclusion of three-bedroom apartments—the kind of units young families need—can get a project in hot water with elected officials. While the justifications for blocking this kind of housing vary from preserving rural character to preventing (real or imagined) school overcrowding, the result is that more and more municipalities are adopting policies designed to keep out children and the families who care for them.
In the New York suburb of Garwood, New Jersey, city officials adopted a master plan earlier in 2018 that places a total prohibition on units with three or more bedrooms. In Nutley, New Jersey, another New York suburb, a July zoning fight came with assurances that three-bedroom units—and the children that come with them—weren’t part of the plan. In the Garden State more broadly, municipalities increasingly meet their state-mandated fair-share affordable housing requirements by building only senior housing. Affordable housing proposals that include three-bedroom units are rejected out of hand, leaving working families with few options.
Every link you click on from this article will make a lie of it. The first one? The Everett property they're whingeing about? I watched that thing sell. Know why they're whingeing? Because the developer wants to add 26 apartments to a single-family-zoned cul-de-sac without addressing parking. Here's from another link: Councilman Jared Taylor, who is president and CEO of Heritage Academy, founded by his father, and sits on the Arizona State Board of Education, used his expertise to address complaints that children from the apartments would burden nearby schools. The project would yield about 70 to 90 students, and when they are dispersed among the different grade levels in schools within a 10-mile radius, the impact is one to three new students per class, which he called manageable. “At the end of the day, schools want students,” he said. So. Don't do anything about the roads, don't do anything about the schools, and a lobbyist who runs a private school says increasing the student load at local public schools by up to 10% from one development isn't a problem. Citylab would like you to believe that old fogey homeowners hate children and millennials. They don't. They hate unchecked development that does nothing to address congestion, they hate unsupported class size increases that do nothing to address funding, and they hate the conversion of single-family neighborhoods into multi-tenant ghettos where nobody has more than a years' worth of commitment to their homes. You don't make housing "cheaper" by piling more people on top of each other and pretending nothing will change. You make housing cheaper by investing in the infrastructure that allows families to thrive and universally, developers give no fucks about infrastructure and will fight tooth and claw to avoid paying for it.“These areas already experience significant congestion,” she said. “We fear the proper infrastructure is not in place to support this project at this time. I feel to pass this at this point in time would be irresponsible.”