Fair Housing - Abandoned Property Act

New Jersey’s Abandoned Property Act remains largely untested. The Act holds promise to both increase the stock of affordable housing and reduce urban blight by giving municipalities stronger tools to identify abandoned properties and transfer them to appropriate non-profit community development organizations.

The Act applies to residential properties that have not been legally occupied for at least 6 months and are in need of rehabilitation, nuisance remediation, or have failed to pay property taxes. Once properties are identified and placed on the abandoned properties list, municipalities can use two important tools to return the properties to productive use: (1) they may hold an expedited tax sale in which purchase of the building is conditioned on criteria such as an agreement to use the building for affordable housing; or (2) they may use spot blight eminent domain power to take possession of the building.

Important eminent domain and due process concerns could be raised by the utilization of the statute. The Institute solicited from the Gibbons Fellowship Program a thoroughgoing memo on the substantive and procedural due process questions that are not addressed by the statute. The memo is now a resource for municipalities interested in utilizing the statute.

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