By Matt Rooney
Governor Mikie Sherrill’s Executive Order No. 17 is being sold as a bold, “whole-of-government” solution to New Jersey’s housing crisis. Strip away the press-release gloss, Save Jerseyans, and it looks more like a recognizable Trenton pattern: more bureaucracy, more centralized control, and more promises deferred to some future “plan.”
“We can’t make New Jersey more affordable without making housing more affordable,” declared Sherrill in an accompanying statement. “With this Executive Order, we are aligning every tool at our disposal to accelerate housing production and make it easier for families to put down roots in the communities they love. Signed within our first 100 days, this action underscores our commitment to lowering costs, strengthening communities, and delivering real results for New Jerseyans. Because when we build more housing, we open the door to opportunity for everyone.”
A meeting in 45 days. A land review in 90. A report in 150!
Over on X, Sherrill rationalized her new executive order as “laying the foundation for a new government-wide housing strategy.”
Huh? Is that even English?
New Jerseyans don’t need another council, report, or deadline. We need relief—now. The national housing crisis impacting younger Americans is most acute here in the Garden State. New Jersey presently LEADS the nation is adult “children” between the ages of 18 and 34 still living at home with mom and dad.
The Governor’s order establishes layers of committees and timelines that stretch into September, with agencies tasked with studying, reviewing, and recommending. But families struggling with skyrocketing rents and property taxes aren’t waiting for another round of government paperwork. They’re making hard choices today—moving out, downsizing, or abandoning the state altogether.
Supporters like Benjie Wimberly and Lou Greenwald praise the plan as “coordinated” and “urgent.” Yet nothing about a 150-day timeline for recommendations communicates urgency. If anything, it signals that Trenton still doesn’t grasp the scale—or immediacy—of the problem it helped create.
Because let’s be honest: New Jersey’s housing shortage didn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s the predictable result of decades of overregulation, punitive taxes, and top-down mandates that make building here slow, expensive, and legally risky. Developers don’t shun New Jersey because they lack enthusiasm; they avoid it because the system is stacked against them.
Executive Order No. 17 doesn’t fundamentally change that. It talks about “cutting red tape,” but leaves intact the very policies that created the tape in the first place—onerous zoning rules, burdensome environmental reviews, and ever-expanding affordable housing mandates that shift costs onto middle-class buyers.
There’s also reason to be wary of the state’s growing appetite to “leverage” public land for housing. That may sound efficient, but it often means Trenton picking winners and losers—deciding what gets built, where, and for whom. That’s not a free-market solution; it’s central planning dressed up as smart growth.
Even more concerning is the ideological drift behind some of the rhetoric supporting this order. When advocates begin describing housing as a “human right,” as some quoted in the announcement do, it signals a move toward policies that treat housing not as a market good to be produced efficiently, but as an entitlement to be allocated by government. History suggests that approach leads to shortages, not solutions.
If Governor Sherrill truly wants to make New Jersey more affordable, she should start with policies that trust people, not bureaucracy. That means reducing regulatory barriers in a meaningful way, reforming zoning at the local level without heavy-handed mandates, and—critically—lowering the tax burden that makes both building and living here so expensive. Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia (R-24) shared 10 steps online in response to Sherrill’s E.O., and none of them need 150 days to bake.
It also means acknowledging that affordability isn’t solely about supply. It’s about the overall cost of living, driven in large part by government spending. Until Trenton addresses that reality, any housing strategy will be incomplete at best.
New Jersey doesn’t need another task force. It needs a course correction away from the Mt. Laurel doctrine thinking which has ruined so many of our communities and accomplished none of the goals its proponents purportedly hoped to achieve.
Executive Order No. 17 may generate headlines and give the appearance of action, but unless it’s followed by real structural reform, it risks becoming just another document in a long line of well-intentioned plans that never quite deliver.
For the families being priced out of their own communities and Gen Z citizens stuck in their parents’ basements, “we’re working on it” is no longer good enough.
