Home Is Where the Hurt Was

On a crisp afternoon, Ethel Lawrence Boulevard looks like any other street in this comfortable suburb. Kids play football in front of gray Cape Cod apartments, station wagons roll by, and an autumnal calm blankets the neighborhood.

“It looks normal, doesn’t it?” asks Ethel Lawrence-Halley, who helps oversee the 140 apartments. “And that’s just the point. After all the anger and hostility we had to deal with building these homes, they look like anywhere else.”

Nestled in the heart of Mount Laurel, near Philadelphia, the Ethel Lawrence Homes are one of the few places in America where affordable housing has been built specifically for poor people -- mostly blacks and Latinos -- in an affluent community.

It took three decades of litigation, legislation and financial wizardry to construct these apartments, and the last tenants moved in this year. But the conflict continues. Some longtime residents remain angry, and activists voice frustration that more apartments haven’t been built elsewhere.

During the last 20 years, New Jersey towns constructed 30,000 units of affordable housing, more than most states. Yet this falls far short of the need, estimated at 650,000 homes. And little of the new housing has been designated for the poor.

Next month, a state commission will issue new affordable housing goals for each community. But even before these figures are released, some officials warn that too much construction could worsen suburban sprawl, and activists worry that the state’s commitment to affordable housing may erode.

The struggle to open suburbia to low-income people and minorities has been waged more intensely in New Jersey than any other state. And it’s largely because of Ethel Lawrence -- a teacher who challenged the Garden State’s exclusionary zoning laws 34 years ago.

She and others won a sweeping courtroom victory, convincing the New Jersey Supreme Court that communities had a constitutional obligation to build affordable housing for the region’s poorest people. No other state has such a legal mandate.

“Ethel Lawrence was an astonishing person, and what she did was very brave,” said David Kirp, co-author of “Our Town,” a book about the Mount Laurel case.

“She took on the system, and she kept pushing the housing issue,” added Kirp, who teaches public policy at UC Berkeley. “What she did was even more sustained than Rosa Parks.”

Lawrence died in 1994, and never saw the townhomes that bear her name. But the housing struggle lived on with her daughter, Lawrence-Halley. She kept fighting for the apartments and is now a project administrator at the 62-acre complex.

They became known as the two Ethels.

“You look at the child and you see the mother’s face,” said Peter O’Connor, a public interest attorney who guided the housing campaign in Mount Laurel. “They’re both fighters.”

Lawrence-Halley is determined to build similar affordable housing throughout New Jersey, the nation’s most suburbanized state. But the painful experience her family had in Mount Laurel gives her pause.

“We fought a long time to finally get these apartments built,” she said, picking up stray pebbles on a pathway. She stood at the intersection of four streets named Faith, Equality, Hope and Tolerance, and added: “The issue didn’t end once we got the housing built and occupied. We’ve still got a lot of work to do here.”

Across America, a growing number of minorities are moving into the suburbs. The vast majority, however, are moderate- and upper-income residents, not the low-income tenants that activists aimed to help at the Ethel Lawrence Homes -- a handsome development of two-story units clustered around a grassy commons and ringed by trees.

Less than half a mile away, large, two-story homes sell for about $500,000 or more in subdivisions bordering fields and small ponds.

Mount Laurel is a bedroom suburb with acres of open space and no commercial center. The housing, which includes million-dollar properties, features ranches, Colonials, split-levels and “McMansions.” About 40,000 people live here.

The town is filled with professionals and business managers who commute to work in Philadelphia or to other suburbs. It is 87% white, and the median family income is $76,280. Some residents in the apartments earn an estimated $10,000 a year.

“The whole point of the Mount Laurel battle was to promote economic justice,” Kirp said. “The courts said rich suburbs don’t have the right to exclude people based on race or class. They had to provide real housing access.”

In Mount Laurel, that theory is being put to the test. And for many townhome residents, the experience has been life-changing.

“My whole outlook is different,” said Chicon Cruz, 27, a single mother of twins who works as an accountant. “I have a sense of hope. My girls can go to a good school. I feel confident about my future for the first time.”

*

The crusade for affordable housing took off in 1970 after an insult in church.

Mount Laurel then was a rural community of 11,200 with slightly more than 350 blacks. Residents had lived quietly together here since before the Civil War. But when some black residents met with Mayor William Haines after church services 34 years ago, many were troubled.

New single-family homes were going up all over town, at prices their grown children could not afford, they said. Why was the community blocking plans to build 34 garden apartments?

“If you people can’t afford to live here,” Haines said, “then you’ll have to move.”

Ethel Lawrence, a teacher and mother of nine, sat infuriated in the front pew, her daughter recalled. She had been leading the drive for low-cost housing, and believed that the town’s refusal to permit zoning for apartments was morally wrong. Especially since the community was welcoming new, mostly white residents to one subdivision after another.

To her friends, Lawrence seemed more inclined to get along than raise a ruckus. But the notion that she and her family might be driven out of town struck an angry chord.

“I’m not done with Mount Laurel,” Lawrence said after church. Soon she joined forces with legal aid lawyers and the NAACP to sue the town. And quite unexpectedly, they won, sending shockwaves through New Jersey.

In its 1975 ruling, the New Jersey Supreme Court said Mount Laurel’s exclusionary zoning was illegal, and that suburbs must change their laws to permit affordable housing. The decision was based on the state constitution, and immune from review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Suburbs balked. So the court issued a second decision in 1983, requiring each community to approve a specific number of affordable housing units.

These rulings went far beyond the experiences of California, Massachusetts and other states, which adopted purely advisory guidelines. If a New Jersey suburb failed to meet its obligations, developers could sue for the right to build affordable housing.

Local officials promised to block the rulings any way they could. The Legislature took control, passing laws that allowed many suburbs to skirt the requirement.

Some towns, for example, paid thousands of dollars to poorer cities to build the housing. Others raised taxes to buy up open space, and kept it off the market.

“Many suburbs have worked hard to remain exclusionary, and they have done it by approving every kind of affordable housing that you can imagine -- for seniors, for moderate-income people -- everything except housing for the poor,” O’Connor said.

Despite the obstacles placed in their way, Ethel Lawrence and her allies refused to give up. The town had grown in size since the lawsuit was filed, but it had created little, if any, housing for low-income people.

The activists battled numerous legal challenges and endured economic downturns, which limited funds for construction. Weeks before her death, Lawrence met with state officials at the site and begged them to fund the project.

About the same time, she asked her daughter to get involved.

Lawrence-Halley, a paralegal who lived nearby, had her own life to worry about. She had two children and a husband who later died of cancer. She did not want to revisit the past.

But she remembered evenings when her mother returned from meetings enraged, because neighbors spat obscenities in her face. She recalled the night a zoning official said low-cost apartments shouldn’t be built in Mount Laurel because blacks used the bathroom more than whites. The sewage system, he said, would be overloaded.

She remembered her childhood, when white kids called her mother names.

“I had to continue this work, because this Mount Laurel battle had become a generational thing for us,” she said. “For me, there was really no choice.”

The Ethel Lawrence Homes were finally approved in 1997. Many hoped the issue had calmed down. Instead, tensions surfaced at final meetings.

“A woman who had been my Girl Scout troop leader years ago came up to me at one meeting and said she was disappointed in how I turned out, because of my work for the housing,” Lawrence-Halley recalled. “It was so hurtful.”

According to the transcript from the Mount Laurel Township Planning Board’s final hearing in 1997, attorney and resident Steve Gershman charged that “middle- and upper-income people are being compelled to support this low-income housing project, and it is being rammed down the Township’s throat.”

When construction began on the $18-million project, the public acrimony began to die down. And then came moving day, three years ago, when the first tenants arrived.

“On that afternoon, when I saw little kids running from school buses to their moms in the new apartments, I cried,” Lawrence-Halley said. “We had come so far.”

*

Today, Councilman Peter McCaffrey says, the town is happy with its new neighbors.

“I think the original opposition, which was based on fear of the unknown, fear of people you didn’t know, has gone away,” said McCaffrey, a five-time mayor who has lived in Mount Laurel since 1972. “Most of that is behind us now.”

Asked about the development recently, however, some residents continued to voice concerns over the apartments and its residents, but they declined to give their names, saying they didn’t want to reopen the issue.

O’Connor, who created Fair Share Housing Development Inc., a nonprofit group that built the apartments, agreed that tensions had generally receded.

The concern now, he said, is how well residents adapt to their new homes.

“Many of the kids are doing fine in school, but like anywhere else there are some children who need extra counseling and help,” he said. “Their mothers need help with day care, because it costs a lot more out here than it does in the inner city.”

Most of the tenants are single mothers who work for medical, real estate and insurance firms, among other small businesses. Rents are based on their income.

Cruz, for example, pays 40% of her annual $27,000 salary to live in one of the split-level townhouses. Her neighbors on Faith Court pay similar rents.

Born in Camden, N.J., Cruz grew up in a neighborhood where drive-by shootings, drug dealing and prostitution were common. She moved in with a boyfriend after high school and had twins with him when still a teenager. He abandoned her.

“Surviving in Camden was tough,” she said. “But everything changed one day when my girlfriend showed me an ad about affordable housing in Mount Laurel.”

Cruz jumped at the chance to start over in a suburb with safe streets and good public schools. She applied for a two-bedroom apartment, along with thousands of other low-income people, and went through background checks. Eight months later, her application was approved.

Now she can’t imagine living anywhere else.

On a quiet Sunday, some neighbors tended lawns. Others unpacked groceries from a trip to a mall. Cruz’s daughters played in their bedroom as she relaxed and watched a football game in the living room. “We have roots now,” she said.

The Mount Laurel court rulings were meant to help people like Cruz. And as Lawrence-Halley proudly strolled through the grounds recently, she described additional open spaces in Mount Laurel that would be ideal for day-care centers and more apartments.

“I hear my mother’s voice all the time, telling me not to relax for one second,” she said. “And I always try to listen to what she says. I’m not done with Mount Laurel.”