Stealing the Farm
Plus: housing reform is killed in Connecticut, bonus ADUs are gutted in San Diego, and two decades of Supreme Court-enabled eminent domain abuse.
Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week's stories include:
- A vetoed housing supply bill in Connecticut.
- A gutting of San Diego's productive "bonus ADU" program.
- The legacy of the Supreme Court's Kelo eminent domain decision two decades on.
But first, our lead item on yet another case of eminent domain abuse in New Jersey.
Town Claims State Affordable Housing Law Forces It to Seize Family Farm for Affordable Housing
Andy Henry's family has managed to hold onto its farm property in Cranbury, New Jersey, for five generations, including through a civil war, the Great Depression, and more recently, generous offers from developers to turn the property into yet another warehouse development dotting the area.
But now Henry might be forced to sell the home where he and his brother were raised to the township of Cranbury, which says it needs the site for affordable housing development.
This week, the Cranbury township council is supposed to vote on an affordable housing plan that would designate Henry's farm, which he co-owns with his brother, as the site for affordable housing.
You are reading Rent Free from Christian Britschgi and Reason. Get more of Christian's urban regulation, development, and zoning coverage.
That vote will enable the township to begin eminent domain proceedings against the farm.
Town officials (who did not respond to Reason's request for comment) have stressed that seizing the farm was not their first choice, but rather a decision forced on them by New Jersey's fair share housing law.
Henry and his attorney counter that the town has many other potential sites it could use for affordable housing and many other tools besides eminent domain to comply with state-set affordable housing goals.
"They saw this little patch of green out there and said, 'oh, we'll just snatch that up.' It's very disappointing to me," he tells Reason.
Through a series of New Jersey Supreme Court decisions and state legislation stretching back decades, Garden State municipalities are required to periodically produce plans and update their land use laws to meet state-set affordable housing goals.
The state is currently in the fourth round of this affordable housing planning, in which Cranbury was given a target of building 265 affordable housing units.
Tim Duggan, Henry's attorney, says that there are many different ways that Cranbury could meet this affordable housing goal that are more respectful of private property rights. It could change its zoning to allow for denser development. It could attempt to voluntarily purchase other sites in the town. It could pass an "inclusionary zoning" law requiring some percentage of new housing to be sold or rented at below-market rates. (This latter option would also impose a burden on private property owners.)
Instead, he says, the township is "trying to take the easy way out by grabbing a farm and building it all at one time."
Cranbury is a small community in central New Jersey, located roughly equidistant between New York and Philadelphia, with I-95 running through it. That's made it an attractive area for logistics businesses, which have been converting the properties surrounding Henry's farm into warehouses over the past few decades.
Henry says that he's received multiple multi-million-dollar offers from warehouse developers to sell his farm. He says none of those eight-digit offers outweigh the sentimental value he places on holding onto the farm property, on which a tenant currently raises cattle and hay.
New Jersey's fair share housing rules are intended not only to produce affordable housing, but also to produce it in areas where future residents will have easy access to jobs, schools, and amenities.
Housing advocates argue that Cranbury's plan to take Henry's farm in the middle of a warehouse district runs counter to the purpose of the law.
The farm is "a two-mile walk to the bus. So people that are out there are not going to have an ability to get access to transportation. They're not going have an inability to get to the community," says Aaron Gordon of the Fair Share Housing Coalition, a New Jersey nonprofit that advocates against housing discrimination.
Henry says he first learned of the township's plan to seize his property back in April. At public hearings, he's attempted to convince the town that his farm is not an appropriate place for affordable housing development.
Local residents have sided with him. They even started a GoFundMe to help raise funds for a coming legal battle.
National media outlets have picked up the story as well. Earlier this month, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins even weighed in on Henry's behalf, calling Cranbury's pending seizure another "[Joe] Biden-style government takeover of our family farms."
On the phone with Andy Henry of Highland Ranch in Cranbury, NJ.
The city govt has approved seizing his 175-year-old family farm via eminent domain for affordable housing units.
Whether the Maudes, the Henrys or others whom we will soon announce, the Biden-style government… pic.twitter.com/0zFSdO9sYj
— Secretary Brooke Rollins (@SecRollins) June 17, 2025
(Rollins also appears to have given $1,000 to the GoFundMe supporting Henry.)
Despite the pressure campaign, Cranbury officials have been unmoved. The town's mayor, Lisa Knierim, has repeatedly stressed that the town's limited undeveloped land and infrastructure leave Henry's farm as one of the few viable sites for affordable housing development.
Henry himself is unimpressed by the town's arguments. If he'd sold out to a developer years ago, the site would be a warehouse today, and the town would have to find another site to designate for affordable housing development.
Cranbury has until June 30 to approve its affordable housing plan. Duggan says once that happens, his client will challenge the attempted seizure in court.
"There's four generations of my family buried in that town," says Henry. "I can't imagine going back there and driving by and seeing that house having been bulldozed."
This story includes reporting by Tosin Akintola.
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont Vetoes Major Housing Supply Law
On Monday, Gov. Ned Lamont (D–Conn.) vetoed legislation that would have created Connecticut's own fair share housing law, citing concerns about the bill's usurpation of localities' land use powers.
"I think the only way to really make it work is if you have buy-in from the local communities. And I think the vast majority of those communities want to do the right thing," Lamont told reporters at a press conference after vetoing House Bill 5002, per CT Mirror.
The 160-page H.B. 5002, passed in early June, included a long list of policies, many of which were straightforwardly deregulatory.
The bill would have generally preempted local minimum parking requirements, allowed "middle housing" development in commercial zones, and required localities to treat manufactured housing the same as site-built homes.
Perhaps most controversially, the bill would have required most municipalities to create plans detailing how they intended to update their land use laws to meet state-set affordable housing goals.
Municipalities that adopted these plans would be given priority for various state grant awards. Under the bill, municipalities would also receive priority for state funding if they rezoned to allow housing near transit stops.
The bill received opposition from state conservative groups like the Yankee Institute (which described it as creating "one-size-fits-all housing mandates") and advocates for local control like the Council of Small Towns (which goes by the somewhat ironic acronym COST).
A few states have similar laws requiring localities to continually zone for more housing, and particularly more affordable housing.
The previously discussed New Jersey law is the most productive of the bunch. California's long-standing planning law has arguably been a long-running, bureaucratic flop.
As a general rule, it's hardly ideal to have a system where a state agency estimates local affordable housing needs and then hands down planning mandates to localities.
There's a conceptual flaw in the idea that state agencies can intelligently figure out how much housing should be built where, or that a significant percentage of new housing needs to be below the market rate in order to make communities affordable.
Freed from zoning and land use regulations, market-rate developers would be building a lot more housing, and housing costs would be more affordable for people of all income levels.
With all that said, state planning laws like Connecticut's now vetoed H.B. 5002 generally just require localities to remove zoning barriers to private housing production. Sifting through all the surface-level state-set housing targets and mandates, the end product of these laws is local deregulation.
Lamont, by vetoing H.B. 5002, is guaranteeing that less of that local deregulation comes to pass.
San Diego Guts Productive ADU Bonus Program
The San Diego City Council voted earlier this month to significantly pare back its local accessory dwelling unit (ADU) program that had been proving reasonably successful at enabling "middle housing" production in the central city.
First passed in 2021, the Bonus ADU Program allows for up to four ADUs citywide and a theoretically unlimited (but practically capped) number of units on lots near transit stops. The program also waived off-street parking requirements and relieved builders from having to provide off-site improvements.
About a third of San Diego's housing production has been ADUs, although not all those units were produced via the ADU Bonus program.
The success of the program has also been its undoing. Neighborhood activists argue that many of the ADU developments it allowed were too large and out of scale for the single-family neighborhoods where they are being built.
A local paper even ran a "worst ADU" contest to lampoon the "monster ADUs" enabled by the program.
For several months now, the city council has been considering various ways of limiting how much development could happen under the ADU Bonus Program.
The final changes the council passed represent a significant rollback, says Saad Asad, the advocacy and communications chair for the advocacy group YIMBY Democrats of San Diego.
"It's a death by a thousand cuts," he says of the changes. "Any one of them would be fine perhaps on its own. When you combine them all, it really makes them restrictive."
Now bonus ADUs will have to pay community enhancement fees, will have to provide off-street parking if they're more than a half-mile away from transit, and incorporate more fire safety standards. These bonus ADUs from now on can't be built on cul-de-sacs or in many low-density zones. The new policy also places more unit caps on ADU developments.
Asad notes that many of these restrictions do not apply to detached single-family developments. He says most of the changes don't address the most reasonable critiques of the program, namely that it was allowing very large, 100-plus ADU developments in areas without the infrastructure to handle them.
In fits and starts, California has been peeling back its voluminous land use restrictions. San Diego's changes to its ADU Bonus Program are an example of the state moving in the opposite direction of more restrictions still.
Two Decades After Kelo
In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its infamous Kelo v. New London decision that allows governments to seize private property via eminent domain and then hand it off to another private party for economic development.
The decision has enabled any number of cases of eminent domain abuse, many of which we've covered here at Rent Free. It also sparked a public backlash that's led to legislative guardrails on eminent domain in several states.
In a new article, Ilya Somin, a George Mason University law professor and eminent domain expert, describes the post-Kelo backlash to eminent domain and the ongoing efforts to reestablish federal constitutional private property protections that the decision gutted.
Quick Links
- Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has signed into law a raft of state zoning reforms aimed at peeling back local red tape and boosting housing production. You can read more about what Texas passed here and here.
- Read Reason's Jack Nicastro on why selling off federal lands is a good thing.
- A court upholds Kingston, New York's decision to force landlords to cut rents.
- The San Francisco Chronicle has a fun visual guide to single-stair reform.
- After a long-running fight, Elizabeth Street Garden in New York City won't become housing after all.
