PINE BEACH – Merion Avenue stripes across the small borough before becoming a driveway leading into the parking lot of Pine Beach Elementary School. It’s been a quiet area, where kids could walk to school, but neighbors grew concerned that an apartment complex could be built there.
At the center of the issue is affordable housing. For decades, the state has been requiring towns to provide opportunities for people with low income to live in towns. This has taken different form over the years. The current iteration is the fourth round of Fair Share Housing. This counts how many affordable units there are in a town, how many are needed, and how many could possibly be built.
Every town in New Jersey has had to negotiate with the state this year because the fourth round is from 2025 to 2035. Pine Beach was told by a judge that they needed to provide 30 units of affordable housing, while the town’s calculations were just three.
If the town had to provide 30 units, an apartment complex was probably the only way to satisfy that number. The land by the school is the only space large enough to build something of that nature, and it was noticed in a review by the State Department of Community Affairs.
What followed was weeks of residents dedicated to fighting any apartments and coming to meetings to protest any large scale development.
At the most recent Land Use Board meeting, the small meeting room was filled yet again. A collective sigh of relief came when officials said the town is going to give the land to the county’s open space program.
The Ocean County Natural Lands Trust Fund collects money on all property in the county and uses it to buy and forever preserve land. Usually they negotiate a price with the property owner but in this case the borough is handing it over.
The Borough Council is expected to vote on giving the land to the county at an upcoming meeting. The OCNLTF requires this, because the town is making it so that taxes can never be collected on this land.
“The land has environmental value,” said Michael Herbert, an affordable housing attorney retained by the town. “With that (donation), we no longer have open land for affordable units. We will now submit a new plan. The new number for the town is zero.”
Still, the town has to make some plans for future affordable housing, said Mark Rohmeyer, a planning engineer from Morgan Municipal.
One such plan is to change the zoning on land on Route 9. If any of those properties change from commercial to residential, and five or more residential units are built, then 20% of them have to be affordable, he said. For example, the existing building could get knocked down and be replaced with retail on the first floor with apartments on the second.
There is also a “scattered site” program that new construction on empty lots could be affordable, but they don’t have to be contiguous like an apartment complex, he said. The town is mostly built out, so there are few lots that fit this description.
The Land Use Board voted to send this recommendation to the Borough Council and half of the audience left. Then, Board member Justine Saxton announced news she just got on her phone that the Ocean County Natural Lands Trust Committee will recommend to the County Commissioners that they should accept the donation.
The commissioners would vote on this at one of their future meetings.
Legal Fight?
Herbert told the public that the Fair Share Housing Center will likely object to most plans, but noted there are hundreds of towns in the state.
Developers could also object to this plan, he said. However, having a plan in place protects the town from builder’s remedy lawsuits.
This is when a developer sues a town, stating that they have essentially zoned poor people out. If the court rules against the town, the town loses a lot of its power in what they want built.
Developers and the State of New Jersey have until August to object, Herbert said. There’s a deadline of March 2026 to have everything finalized.
When the meeting was opened up to questions from the public, most of them had to do with further concerns: Could the state see through this plan and punish Pine Beach for trying? Is the town allowed to do this?
Herbert said there’s no guarantee of anything, but said that the officials are doing everything legally and in a way that should satisfy the state.
Publicity
Land Use Board President Christine Lill said that the first meeting about this was in May and no one from the public was in attendance. There was a special meeting just for this issue which drew a lot of residents. There was another meeting where this wasn’t on the agenda but people still came and discussed it. This was the second special meeting held entirely for this purpose.
Resident Bernadette DiPalma said it’s every resident’s responsibility to be aware of what’s happening in their town, but that is made much easier if the town communicates issues.
One resident said that the idea of giving the land to the county for open space came from the residents, so the borough officials should listen to residents and invite them to help solve issues.
Several residents credited Dot Kulina, who lives on Motor Road where Merion Avenue comes out of the school, for spreading news about the issue on Facebook and by standing on the roadside with signs. If it wasn’t for her, they said, the residents wouldn’t have known about the issue and wouldn’t have fought it.
