Affordable Housing
Creating Affordable, Inclusive and Vibrant Communities Where Everyone Has a Place to Call Home
The Problem
Jersey City faces a growing affordable housing crisis that threatens the stability and diversity of the city’s neighborhoods. Rent has increased by 50% in the last decade, forcing many longtime residents out of their homes. Mussab is committed to accelerating the development of all housing, especially affordable housing, to ensure that everyone can thrive in Jersey City.
Our Solutions
Ending Exclusionary Zoning
Ali’s plan would rezone all R-1 areas in Jersey City to R-2, ending single-family-only zoning and allowing for the construction of modest apartment buildings up to four stories tall. This change would include a 25% affordability requirement built into new developments in rezoned areas above two stories.
Ending exclusionary single-family zoning would empower homeowners, decrease rent prices, and allow for the construction of over 22,000 new homes, including thousands of affordable units.
Critically, it would not affect historic areas or areas currently under redevelopment projects, and would not mandate any new construction or redevelopment. But it would allow for the kind of gradual, city-wide increases in density necessary to overcome Jersey City’s housing shortage.
Enforcing Rent Control
Mussab Ali will strictly enforce Chapter 260, the city’s rent control law, which has gone largely ignored. Rent is up over 50% since 2015. But if rent control had been enforced the way it’s supposed to be, the legal increase would have been closer to 20%. That gap is costing Jersey City renters as much as $51 million every year. Ali's plan pledges for stronger enforcement, stiffer penalties, and a public rent control database so renters can know their rights before they sign a lease.
Creating a Community Land Bank
To tackle blight and speculation, Mussab Ali will create a Community Land Bank to convert the city’s 850+ vacant properties into permanently affordable homes and public spaces. Following the model of Newark’s Community Land Bank, Jersey City could empower a publicly-backed organization to take over abandoned and vacant properties and guarantee they are redeveloped in ways that benefit the community.