A major crisis facing Cape May County is the lack of decent housing that young working families can afford. Many who work hard to support this county and its businesses cannot afford the goal of home ownership here.
This is no secret. Elected officials have repeatedly pointed to the need for such housing with promises to do something about it, promises they have not delivered on.
First, we need to be very clear. In this context we are not talking just about officially declared affordable housing that fits with federal Housing and Urban Development guidelines. We are not talking about the formal affordable housing obligations that grow out of the set of Mount Laurel court decisions and require income thresholds and rental set-asides in newly built communities of expensive homes.
No, we are talking about homes that working families can afford without having to meet federal or state guidelines for deed-restricted housing as a group of designated residents in communities they otherwise could not live in and always adding up to no more than 20% of the population.
We are talking about housing that would allow us to become a county of parents again instead of one increasingly of grandparents. We are talking about housing that might allow the number of homeless in the county to decline instead of grow. We are talking about housing that opens doors of opportunity to young families.
Cape May County is by far the “oldest” county in the state. The vibrancy that comes from the young is lost here and replaced by the more muted characteristics of a retirement age population.
We know our school-age population has declined at a much more rapid rate than the overall decline in county inhabitants. Instead of looking at the quality of schools for their kids, newcomers who are replacing young families are looking at the county’s retirement amenities.
Lower numbers of school-age kids means declines in state school aid, but we act as though the state owes us an adjustment for a decline we have done nothing to remedy. In 2000 a full 20% of the county’s population was under 18 years of age. Twenty years later that number was 17%, with a full 10,000 young people lost to the county population count. Now, in using 2023 data, the Census Bureau tells us that a mere 1,500 individuals out of 95,000 are 18 or younger.
The mean age of adults increases yearly. The number of children decreases yearly. A principle reason is the lack of attractive, decent housing for that full third of the county with household incomes below $50,000. And for those in that range or even somewhat higher who fled to other counties as more affordable and welcoming.
Zoning is a big part of our problem. We have created the problem we supposedly are intent on correcting. By limiting density and adding numerous building requirements to new construction, we have taken away from developers any opportunity to build for this population of working-class families.
Instead we concentrate on meeting our legal Mount Laurel housing obligations as though we would ever come close to hitting those numbers and as if hitting them would solve anything. The official government-defined affordable housing goals are almost all described as rentals. We act as though home ownership should not be a goal for working families.
Rental inventory is needed, to be sure, but so is the opportunity for home ownership. Rising land values are making the affordability crunch more intense. We need higher-density, multifamily housing types that can benefit middle- and working-class households. A focus on zoning intentionally designed to lower the cost of housing development is one of the only realistic pathways open to us.
There is little doubt that residential zoning requirements as they now exist make the creation of housing within reach of middle- and working-class families in our county harder and less likely to happen.
The housing crisis is not just causing us to lose young families, it is leading to the loss of those families with the highest educational attainment. Again, census data show that more than a third of our resident population has a degree attainment level no greater than high school. That is higher than the state average.
Housing availability impacts the character of a county. We have the power to improve on the housing opportunities available to our residents and workers. The question is whether we have the will to do so.