U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Tuesday denied an appeal to New Jersey’s affordable housing rules sought by several Garden State municipalities on Tuesday.
The group, known as Local Leaders for Responsible Planning, filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court this week asking that a March 15 deadline be put on hold while they appeal.
This is the fourth time the group has asked for the deadline to be paused.
“This was a far-fetched effort to undermine and delay a law that is already working wonders,” said Joshua Bauers, director of Exclusionary Zoning Litigation at the Fair Share Housing Center.
“The overwhelming majority of municipalities are embracing New Jersey’s affordable housing law and moving ahead with implementation. With the Supreme Court rejecting this appeal, it’s time to focus on creating the affordable homes New Jerseyans urgently need,” he added.
U.S. District Court of New Jersey Judge Zahid N. Quraishi denied the group’s injunction requests twice in recent weeks. Judge Cindy K. Chung of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied the bid in a one‑sentence order last week.
The group appealed, seeking an injunction with the U.S. Supreme Court on Feb. 9.
About 380 municipalities have already developed compliant affordable housing plans as of Dec. 31, 2025, according to the Fair Share Housing Center.
In a statement, New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said “every level of the state and federal courts has now rejected this effort by a small group of towns and their officials to upend New Jersey’s landmark affordable-housing law.”
The towns’ injunction request was filed with what’s known as the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, which was designed for urgent, time-sensitive matters. Cases are typically decided in days or weeks without oral arguments.
Montvale is the lead plaintiff in the case, which includes mostly affluent suburban communities in North and Central Jersey, including Holmdel, Millburn and Franklin Lakes — places that have long resisted high‑density development and previously fought affordable housing mandates in court established under the Mount Laurel doctrine.
The doctrine, established through New Jersey Supreme Court decisions, requires every municipality to use zoning to ensure it provides its fair share of affordable housing.
“The Mount Laurel Doctrine has existed for 50 years and we made no illusion that it may take a very long time to reverse the harmful elements of it that are destroying our New Jersey communities,” Montvale mayor Mike Ghassali said in a statement posted on Facebook.
Other towns included in Montvale’s challenge to New Jersey affordable housing law are Totowa, Wyckoff, Norwood, Millburn, Holmdel, Franklin Lakes, Wall Township, Hawthorne and others.
Towns must rezone to allow for affordable housing by March 15 or they will permanently lose immunity from builder’s remedy lawsuits.
A builder’s remedy lawsuit is a legal tool in New Jersey that allows a developer to sue a town that has failed to meet its court‑mandated affordable housing obligations.
Once the zoning changes are made, builders can apply to build high-density developments under the new rules.
The municipalities initially filed a lawsuit in state court challenging the Affordable Housing Reform Law signed by then-Gov. Phil Murphy in 2024.
The law eliminated the state Council on Affordable Housing and created a new court‑managed system for calculating municipal housing obligations and resolving disputes.
The towns argued the law violated the Mount Laurel doctrine and raised several other legal issues, including unfunded mandates, special‑interest legislation, separation‑of‑powers concerns and an improper transfer of authority to the Administrative Director of the Courts.
In their challenge to the state’s affordable housing rules, the municipalities also argued that urban aid municipalities — communities that receive state funding due to economic distress — are exempt from affordable housing requirements because of a 40-year-old formula created when their populations were dwindling.
That shift placed the affordable housing burden onto smaller, non‑urban aid towns, which in some cases must provide four times their usual share, according to the emergency filing.
“Urban aid municipalities ... are not even required to satisfy the need generated by their own population growth,” it was stated in the emergency legal filing. “Instead, the prospective need they generated is redistributed upon non-urban aid municipalities.”
In October, Mercer County Superior Court Judge Robert Lougy dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the legislature has the authority to enforce the Mount Laurel doctrine and that the municipalities’ challenge lacked legal grounds.
The towns then turned to federal court, where the case was dismissed on Jan. 20.
A New Jersey judge ruled that municipalities cannot bring this type of constitutional challenge in federal court and noted that even if the 2024 law were struck down, the towns would still face the same affordable housing obligations under decades of Mount Laurel rulings.
