I want to know which municipalities in New Jersey build the most new housing. There are multiple ways to measure this, but I started with permits for new housing construction. Past news coverage didn’t put these numbers in proper context. Of course more populous places permit more than tiny towns. The more interesting question is, which places permit more housing relative to their population?

I want to take demolition permits into account. If a town bulldozed 100 units and built 50 new units, then they actually lost housing on net and looking at construction permits alone would miss this fact.

Here’s an 11-year perspective of net new housing permitted in all 565 of New Jersey’s municipalities from 2010 to 2020:1

The “permit rate” column answers the question posed earlier: Which places built the most per 1,000 residents? Which towns saw their 2010 population and worked toward a future of growth for the next decade?

Of course North Jersey dominates the top 10. I’m surprised that Woolwich Township, an affluent Philly suburb, made it.

Just outside Newark, the town of Harrison permitted the most net new housing per resident. There and Weehawken are quite far ahead of everywhere else in that regard. Newark, itself, didn’t permit nearly as much as nearby Jersey City, despite demolishing less. This, of course, could be for a number of reasons. Even if both cities are similarly open to granting new housing permits, perhaps more people are moving to JC because it’s right next to NYC.

This get at an issue with looking at permits alone: It tells you how much building gets done, but not how much building we should do if we want to adequately and affordably house all residents.2 Net new housing measures supply growth but only hints at demand, which can’t be measured directly. Places in greater demand need more housing, and places where demand growth outpaces supply growth still aren’t building enough. Gentrification and displacement of long-time, poorer residents results in part from housing demand outpacing supply. Still, building more per 1,000 residents is better than no building, so this post is a start.

Here’s a map (though there isn’t stark enough variation to make it very interesting):

  1. Here’s the code I used to create this dataset. There’s also a data file showing annual permits for different types of housing (single- and multi-family), for each municipality.↩︎

  2. We can debate whether a private housing market could ever guarantee adequate and affordable housing for all, but I hope we can agree that more private housing is better than no new housing at all.↩︎