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The American Dream of buying, improving or maintaining property
in New Jersey is dying. Children will be forced to move away as will their
parents when they retire since housing is so severely restricted.
The Highlands Act spells the end of most family farms. In the preservation area, it is no longer legal to divide your land among your children unless there is sufficient acreage for each child to build a house 88 acres if there is any woodlands, or 25 acres if it is open fields. And the option of selling off a building lot in order to save the family farm is no longer possible. Property improvements are restricted or banned in many areas. So are normal maintenance activities like cutting trees and brush cutting without a management plan. Houses can not be built in the preservation area on less than 88 acres if it is partially or totally wooded, and 25 acres if it is open field. No more than ¼ acre can be taken up by impervious surfaces which include the house, driveway, deck, pool, etc. Less than an acre can be disturbed for the whole project. Nothing can be build on slopes over 20%. Lots existing as of August 10, 2004 are exempted, as long as the house is for personal use by someone who owned the land on August 10, 2004. If the land changed hands after August 10,2004, a house can be built, but it will be subject to the ¼ acre impervious coverage and 1 acre maximum disturbance rules. Once a house in the preservation area is sold, the next owner cannot make improvements that involve reconstruction larger than 25% of the original footprint of the house. Nor can more than ¼ of an acre be impervious cover. Owners as of August 10, 2005 may build additions without these restrictions. In order to build in the preservation zone, expensive studies must be done before applying for permission with the DEP. Not just water studies, but species habitat and potential historical value. Smart Growth high density housing of 5 or more houses per acre is being forced upon us throughout the state. The vast majority of future building in the entire Highlands area will be high density. Forcing the population back into the cities is an openly discussed goal. Obtaining mortgages has become difficult or impossible in the Preservation Area due to the huge fall in appraisal values. School taxes can be a problem in towns where part of the town is in the preservation area and part of the town is in the planning area when schools need to be funded due to growth in the planning area, yet ratables are decreasing in the preservation area. Property taxes will also be increasing in the planning area as people in the preservation area pay less due to much lower assessments. Towns are being encouraged to use eminent domain to obtain private property in areas targeted for high density redevelopment. It is feared that eminent domain will also be used to obtain land in critical habitat areas such as property adjacent to land that has already been preserved by the government. Property values in the Preservation area have fallen 80-90% Houses in the Planning area are difficult to sell since the potential for restrictions and higher taxes is so high that attorneys are steering buyers away from the area altogether. No funding is in place to compensate landowners for the lost value. Green Acres and Farmland Preservation, both of which take years to finalize and both of which pay far less than market value, are running out of money. Property owners are underbidding each other in a frenzied effort to get even a fraction of what their land was worth in 2004. The only hope for most property owners to get compensated for their loss in property values is through a Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) program where they sell their development rights to a builder in another area. Not only doesn't the TDR program exist, but it is expected to carry with it onerous deed restrictions, including the right of the DEP to come onto the owners land at any time to inspect it. Builders and landowners who can afford to do so are suing the State of NJ for violations of their constitutional rights, such as the right to be compensated when the government takes property. These lawsuits will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, which will be shared by every taxpayer in the state of NJ. Every taxpayer will shoulder the unnecessary billions of dollars that the Highlands bill will cost to implement and administer. The government already owns about 1/3 of the land in NJ and is already unable to even document their holdings, let alone manage thousands more acres. The owners of the large tracts of land in the Highlands have been good stewards for generations, resulting in extremely pure water for use by millions of NJ citizens. With the land under state management, this stewardship is at risk. Privately owned forests are actively managed, but the odds of getting funding for the state to do it are low. Forest fires, erosion, and wildlife imbalances are a huge risk. Home rule is dead. All land use decisions in the Preservation area are made by unelected officials in Trenton. Those same officials will use strong and misleading tactics to get local officials to agree to having land in the Planning area conform with their master plan. |