I’m giving an overview of NJHOMES Atlas to New Jersey mayors and legislators on September 24, in my role as Director of the DHCR Data Center at the NJ Department of Community Affairs. Atlas is a vacant land mapping tool my team is building for the municipalities that receive federal Community Development Block Grant funding.
Session Details
NJHOMES Atlas: Mapping Municipally Owned Vacant Land September 24, 2026, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM — DCA Mayors and Legislators Webinar Series
The Federal Requirement
Under the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, every municipality that takes federal housing block grant money has to publish an online, searchable list of the empty land it owns. The requirement takes effect October 1, 2026, and it covers land a town owns anywhere, not only the parcels inside its own borders. No federal guidance or funding is attached to it yet.
What NJHOMES Atlas Does
Atlas is a statewide inventory of municipally owned vacant land covering all 564 New Jersey municipalities. It draws on the State’s property tax assessment records, which are the only source that describes every town on the same terms, and it puts each parcel on a map instead of in a list. The current count runs to roughly 42,000 vacant parcels and about 110,000 acres, which group into somewhere near 27,000 contiguous sites that could actually be built on.
Corrections Come From the Towns
Assessment records go stale. Land gets sold, built on, or dedicated to some other use, and the State’s copy does not always catch up. So the State list is where a municipality starts rather than where it ends: each town corrects its own entries, and every correction carries a reason and the name of the person who made it. The corrected version is what that town publishes. A town that can show its work has a far better answer for the federal government than a town that did nothing.
Why One Statewide Tool
Most towns have no practical way to build this on their own. Left to sort it out individually, about a dozen New Jersey cities would each hire a vendor and assemble a version from the same underlying assessment data, producing a dozen lists that disagree with one another and no statewide picture.
Atlas sits inside NJ HOMES Choice, which municipalities already use, so there is nothing to install and no GIS expertise required. It is built for a part-time municipal clerk, works on a phone, and embeds directly into a town’s own website, which is what the federal rule asks for. Stafford Township already runs an NJ HOMES project planner that way. DCA offers the tool to municipalities at no cost, and my team provides technical assistance to towns working through the requirement.
Related Work
Atlas is the newest piece of the NJ HOMES Choice Tool, the A4/S50 affordable housing planning platform it is built into. The tool is also being promoted at the 30th Annual Governor’s Conference on Housing and Economic Development on September 29 and 30 in Atlantic City.
About the Author
