Honored to receive the Governor’s Team Excellence Award as part of the A4-S50 implementation team at DCA.
The work
A4-S50 established new affordable housing obligations for all 564 New Jersey municipalities — the fourth round of the COAH process, and the first in years to have actual teeth. My contribution was on the technical side: building the data infrastructure that the NJHOMES program runs on.
That meant designing the database architecture to track affordable housing units across every municipality, building dashboards for compliance monitoring, writing APIs for data sharing between DCA and municipal planning departments, and putting together automated reporting tools for state and federal requirements. The applications are React and TypeScript, running on cloud infrastructure with GIS integration for the spatial analysis work.
The goal was to make municipal obligations visible and trackable in real time — not just for state staff, but for advocates and municipal officials trying to understand what they owe and what they’ve already built toward it.
The team
This was very much a team effort. The technical work is one piece; the policy experts who translated the legislation into workable program rules, the legal staff, the housing professionals dealing directly with municipalities — that’s where most of the hard problems actually lived. The award belongs to all of them.
The implementation is ongoing. There’s more to do on public-facing data access and connecting the housing data to broader planning contexts, and that work is continuing.
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