The Asbury Park Press’ year-long investigation into affordable housing exposed widespread, illegal discrimination, health violations and misspending of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Although Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration regularly points to housing as a priority to make New Jersey a “state of opportunity,” rampant problems — some created by the government — persist for tens of thousands of renters who have no place to turn for help, the Press found.

“The whole concept that low- and moderate-income people are not entitled to live in a safe and clean and productive environment, it’s a myth that we’ve all been fighting for years to dispel,” Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver said at a roundtable discussion on housing inequities last month. The roundtable, however, failed to develop any tangible plans to make low-income housing safe and discrimination free.

And when the Press presented the attorney general and governor’s office with clear examples of housing violations and discrimination, the administration responded with silence.

Murphy, Oliver, who oversees housing as the commissioner of the Department of Community Affairs, and acting Attorney General Matthew Platkin have denied multiple interview requests with the Press on how they plan to combat the housing inequities that plague renters who make up nearly one-third of the state’s population.

New Jersey is the sixth most expensive location in the nation for renters, according to research by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, and has only 31 available affordable rentals for every 100 extremely low income families in need.

Matt Shapiro, president of the New Jersey Tenants Organization, said he wasn’t surprised by the lack of response from state officials. He said renters are “second-class citizens” in the eyes of the state.

“Despite the fact that we’ve changed New Jersey to a large extent and gotten a lot of laws passed, (their status as second-class citizens) hasn’t changed,” he said.

Charlotte Jackson, a former Asbury Park renter whose story was featured in the Press last year after her landlord refused to clean up a mold infestation that was making her family sick, said she felt “helpless and ignored” by local and state officials.

“We had to sacrifice so much – financially, emotionally – and what do we do from here?” Jackson told the Press. “We endured a lot, just to have no justice? (We) tried to make it a home and it was robbed from us.

“Just because we’re low-income, they treated us like dogs.”

Findings from the Press’ affordable housing investigations include:

• Slack enforcement of the law: Landlords unlawfully discriminate against Section 8 voucher holders with little fear of getting caught, because the Division on Civil Rights does not employ proven enforcement techniques like undercover testing for discrimination – and instead relies on vulnerable tenants to report violators of the law themselves. Even then, tenants say their cases go ignored for weeks at a time, with little hope of resolution.
• No solutions for uninhabitable units: Tenants facing mold infestations in their apartments have nowhere to turn, because state and national officials have failed to pass laws regulating the fungus – even in taxpayer-funded buildings – which can cause respiratory illnesses and cost thousands of dollars to properly fix.
• Lax monitoring of affordable housing funds: With no one keeping watch, a $2.27 million affordable housing program in Asbury Park paid to refurbish a luxury summer rental while leaving low-income tenants unhoused. Local mismanagement led to exorbitant rents and a shortage of affordable housing in a city already grappling with rapid gentrification. State officials passed the buck on calls for an investigation into the program, which is part of a $209 million statewide initiative.

Since Murphy and his officials haven’t publicly addressed the issues, the Press asked housing advocates from across the state to offer their own solutions. The three key changes the state needs to enact to protect renters are:

1. Follow the law: More enforcement and monitoring
A Woodbridge landlord broke the law when she denied Tonya Wood’s Section 8 housing voucher, explicitly telling Wood, “We don’t take that.”

Landlords in Asbury Park flouted the law when they ignored state regulations for an affordable housing program that capped how much they could charge for rent. And city officials aided them by disregarding the law themselves, neglecting the state’s requirements for monitoring of the program.

Yet, in both cases, tenants affected by the violations are still waiting for someone to be held accountable.

Housing advocates said the lack of accountability illuminates how simply passing laws aren’t enough: The state needs to enforce them.

“How helpful is legislation if it doesn’t actually get followed up on?” said Staci Berger, president of the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey. “From an advocacy perspective, it’s frustrating when there are laws that are supposed to protect people that landlords and others willfully ignore, because there’s not enough penalty or they don’t think they’re going to get caught.”

Bias against Section 8 voucher holders is barred under New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination. But a Press investigation found landlords violate the law with impunity, as state officials rely on a plodding complaint process that leaves tenants in the dark for months at a time and yields few successful cases as their chief enforcement mechanism.

Wood filed a discrimination complaint with the state Division on Civil Rights in August and, almost a year later, is still waiting for state investigators to hold the landlord accountable. Her calendar is plotted with missed deadlines the state agency promised – and failed – to meet and unsuccessful attempts to reach officials in charge of her complaint, leaving her with no recourse for the discrimination she faced.

Meanwhile, housing advocates in New York City have successfully employed undercover discrimination testing to swiftly catch violators of the law and hold them accountable.

Housing advocates in New Jersey urged state officials to dedicate sustained funding to the Division on Civil Rights to investigate discrimination both proactively, through undercover investigations, and retroactively through a more efficient system for tenant complaints.

Adam Gordon, executive director of Fair Share Housing Center, said that commitment from the state is crucial after legislators last year passed the Fair Chance in Housing Act, a landmark law that housing providers from asking about criminal history on housing applications in most instances.

In March, the Division on Civil Rights announced it had sent cease-and-desist letters to seven housing providers with discriminatory advertisements that violated the new law. But Gordon said sustained enforcement is “critical” in these cases.

“If this is the only investigation for the next three years, then pretty quickly landlords are going to say they’re not really serious about this,” Gordon said.

Enforcement of state laws also extends to local and state officials.

Housing advocates said the mismanagement of affordable housing funding in Asbury Park revealed no one was keeping watch on how the taxpayer money was spent.

A Press investigation found Asbury Park officials spent $2.27 million to rehabilitate apartments for its lowest income tenants, and then failed to monitor whether those units were kept affordable. The city’s negligence allowed one landlord to list his unit on Airbnb for $20,000 a month and, in another case, resulted in Lanece Ferguson, a low-income tenant, losing her home after illicit rental increases by her landlord.

Ferguson appealed to city officials for help in 2019, but three years later is still waiting for city and state officials to answer for the mismanagement that cost her family their home.

Gordon said monitoring of affordable housing in New Jersey has a complicated past: Affordable housing became highly politicized during Gov. Chris Christie’s administration, to the point that he stripped the now-defunct Council on Affordable Housing of its monitoring power. Gordon said any replacement housing agency run by the state could carry a similar risk of being politicized by whoever is in power.

And Gordon said New Jersey’s system of home rule could also get in the way. Even when the state oversaw affordable housing, many towns ignored monitoring requirements without penalty. Gordon said Fair Share Housing Center faces the same problem when requiring municipalities to report their progress on affordable housing settlements.

“Monitoring, to be effective, has to be done at such a robust level,” Gordon said. “One of the things that’s even really telling about the Asbury story is that, on paper, all the documents they submitted said all the right things. They just didn’t actually do it.”

But one solution housing advocates suggested was a state-run system that audits affordable housing trust funds at a granular level. That idea would require state legislators to empower an agency like the Department of Community Affairs with such oversight.

“You do spot checks,” said Tracy Rogers, an advocate with the Asbury Park Affordable Housing Coalition. “And once people know there’s a possibility they could be audited – it might change how everything is looked at.”

Shapiro, from the tenants organization, said that auditing system would need to have the power to “set an example” by penalizing municipalities that violate the law.

But Gordon said any auditing system would once again rely on strong state enforcement.

“There’s got to be teeth to it,” Gordon said. “There’s got to be someone who is actually willing to follow up on it.”

2. Better access: Streamline tenant protections
Nearly every phone call Shapiro fields at the New Jersey Tenants Organization is because the person on the other end doesn’t know where else to turn.

They call asking for help on security deposit issues, eviction, landlord harassment, rental increases, apartment conditions and more, Shapiro said.

They call, mostly, to ask what their rights are as a tenant living in someone else’s home.

But what if there was a state agency that could easily tell them?

“We’re not capable of dealing with 1 million families (who rent in New Jersey),” Shapiro said. “It’s not possible for a small, private organization to field that many calls.”

Housing advocates said the state needs to streamline its tenant services to allow tenants easier access to existing tools and information renters can use to fight housing issues.

“There’s not one department at the state level that’s responsible for all the housing rules and regulations in every instance,” said Berger, from the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey.

Berger said the state lacks a “single point of entry” for housing issues, creating a barrier for residents who don’t know which department to turn to. She thinks an “office of tenant services” or a program like the state’s 211 system could help.

Berger said a state agency dedicated to tenant services could address both the social service aspect of housing – answering questions about how to qualify for affordable housing – and the legal aspect of tenant rights. Alternatively, or maybe in conjunction, a housing hotline like 211 could field concerns and refer tenants to the appropriate department, without having to reorganize the current structure of government.

“Having that kind of streamlined operation on the front end, even if it’s not totally streamlined on the back end, it’s helpful because it gives the resident the ability to get that information fairly easily,” Berger said.

One example of the state’s shortfall in streamlining services is the lack of a single application for available affordable housing across the state, Berger said. Currently, tenants must submit individual applications to each housing authority or complex they want to be considered for – costing them time and money for each application.

Gordon, from Fair Share Housing Center, said the state could look to New York City for an example of a more efficient system: The city manages one online application portal for available affordable housing in all five boroughs.

While there are differences in bureaucracy between a single city and a state with 564 municipalities, New York City has just about the same amount of people in their jurisdiction. Gordon said a single application process in New Jersey would “require some coordination, but that makes a lot more sense.”

3. Time to catch up: Legislation needs to reflect the modern age
Some housing inequities are simply the result of people outsmarting the system.

Gordon said it’s crucial for state officials to regularly update legislation to better protect against loopholes or new scenarios that are used to restrict access to safe, clean, affordable housing.

New Jersey renters plagued with mold in their apartments have few options to compel their landlord to provide a fix because the fungus is not regulated at the state or national level. And the one option the state does offer – an avenue to withhold rent under the “warranty of habitability” clause – leaves tenants at risk of retaliation, advocates said.

Under the law, a tenant can notify their landlord of a mold infestation or another major housing issue and withhold rent until it is rectified, depositing the cash into an escrow account held by the court. But if the landlord takes the tenant to court, a judge may decide the mold problems are not severe enough to prompt the warranty of habitability defense, leaving the tenant at risk of eviction. And that appearance in court could stain a tenant’s record when they attempt to search for new housing.

Gordon said new, third-party technology used to screen tenants is making it harder for people to find housing. The screenings flag appearances in landlord-tenant court and immediately deny tenants, without investigating further.

“I think our laws need to be updated to recognize that we have these technologies that have really been abused by taking some information that has no relevance of somebody being a good tenant,” Gordon said. “The fact that you sued your landlord for mold – that should not be a factor that can be used against you.

“Once people are put in a bad situation and try to get out of it, they’re pushed even deeper into that situation. And I think that there’s more change that needs to happen along those lines.”

Charlotte Jackson’s family of six are sleeping on air mattresses in a South Carolina apartment they can’t afford, after they were forced out of a mold-infested, subsidized Asbury Park unit that their landlord refused to clean – emboldened by the absence of mold regulations in New Jersey. She asked her landlord for nearly two years to remediate the mold infestation, which was making her family sick. Finally, Jackson said, they had no choice but to move out.

One piece of pending legislation that could help is the Mold Safe Housing Act, a nearly 10-year-old bill proposed by Sen. Robert W. Singer, R-Ocean, that would create standards for mold testing and remediation and include a measure that would hold landlords responsible for abating mold in all rental properties.

Another option might be to remove barriers to the warranty of habitability – including the requirement to deposit the funding in escrow or passing legislation that would hide some appearances in landlord-tenant court from background checks, Gordon said.

And expanding “right to counsel” measures could also help. In 2018, Newark became the third city nationwide to offer free legal services to low-income tenants facing evictions, citing a “housing emergency” as the result of “frivolous and/or retaliatory eviction actions by landlords” in the city. In total, 15 cities and three states – Connecticut, Washington and Maryland – offer tenants such protection.

Gordon said legal advice is important for enforcing tenant rights – but a right to counsel law requires funding.

Housing advocates said they also support other pending legislation, including bills that would consolidate affordable housing applications and establish more forgiving guidelines for credit checks on tenants applying for that housing.

“There’s all kinds of legislation that’s been out there and kind of moved on various points, but none of it has gone to the finish line,” Gordon said.

And he said state officials need to consider one of the biggest issues: A housing shortage perpetuates uninhabitable living situations, because landlords are emboldened when they know tenants have nowhere else to turn.

“If you’re a landlord with mold, and you’re renting to someone and they have other options available, they’re going to leave,” Gordon said. “But if all of the other options are apartments that cost hundreds or thousands more a month, you’re stuck. It’s basically forcing people to live in untenable situations.”