On September 24, 2026, I presented NJHOMES Atlas to New Jersey mayors and legislators as part of the NJ Department of Community Affairs’ Mayors and Legislators Resource Series, in my role as Director of the DHCR Data Center. I co-presented with Lucas Doell, the Data Center’s software engineering team lead, and roughly 80 municipal and legislative participants joined live. The full recording is embedded above.
Session Details
Turning Vacant Land into Opportunity: Meeting the vacant parcel requirement in the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act September 24, 2026, 11:00 AM – DCA Mayors and Legislators Resource Series Presenters: Gavin Rozzi, Director of Data Center Administration, and Lucas Doell, Software Engineering Team Lead, DHCR Data Center
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. You can browse Atlas yourself.
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 NJHOMES 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 NJHOMES 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.
Program Flyer
The flyer circulated ahead of the session invited municipalities to join the NJHOMES Vacant Land Mapping Tool pilot.
Press Release
DCA announced NJHOMES Atlas on October 2, 2026, eight days after this session, and the release quotes me on why the tool was built. I wrote up notes on the release, including the Commissioner’s quote and the Stafford Township pilot.
Related Work
Atlas is the newest piece of the NJHOMES Choice Tool, the A4/S50 affordable housing planning platform it is built into. That portfolio entry covers the planner, the Atlas parcel inventory, and the correction workflow in more depth. Atlas was also presented at the 30th Annual Governor’s Conference on Housing and Economic Development in Atlantic City on September 29 and 30, where the slides are posted.
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