A little more than a week after Spring Lake Heights agreed to her plan, 94-year-old Helen Motzenbecker unfurled the blueprint: The project on Route 71 will include commercial space and five condominium units, including one that will be designated as affordable.

When it is completed, it will barely make a dent in a state where affordable housing is hard to find. But Motzenbecker thinks her case will knock down the doors, clearing the way for more affordable housing to come.

"I didn't intend to do anything good in my life," Motzenbecker said, sitting on a couch in her Spring Lake home days before Christmas. "But (affordable housing) became the thing that I was most proud of."

Motzenbecker's victory in Spring Lake Heights marks the third time she has fought and won her bid to bring affordable housing to a community. Given the time and expense to get through the approval process, she suspects this could be her last hurrah.

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If so, it will be a bookend to a life that saw her go from a social butterfly who spent her summers on the Spring Lake party scene to a social activist who won New Jersey's first "builder's remedy" case, which allows developers to build high-density, affordable housing despite objections from the town.

During the process, she was won friends and enemies, as well as respect, even from experts who question developers' true motivation in building affordable housing.

"Helen wasn't about maximizing profit," said Jeffrey Surenian, a Point Pleasant Beach-based attorney who represented Motzenbecker in the 1980s and now represents municipalities. "That wasn't her motivation. She truly cared about this. That's why I have so much respect for her. It wasn't so much about the dollar as it was with every other developer. It was like, look, wouldn't this be great? So I really respected that."

Motzenbecker received approval from the Spring Lake Heights Land Use Board on Dec. 14, more than two years after she bought the property at the age of 92 for what she said was $692,000.

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The go-ahead didn't come without a fight. The property wasn't zoned for multifamily housing, so she sued the borough in January 2021, saying in court documents that the town didn't include any zones that required or encouraged affordable housing.

As a result, she argued, Spring Lake Heights, a borough whose population of close to 5,000 is nearly 96% white, hadn't lived up to its constitutional obligation to provide its fair share of affordable housing, which, in its case, was 145 units. She asked for a builder's remedy.

John Barrett, borough administrator for Spring Lake Heights, said he couldn't comment because of ongoing litigation. Spring Lake Heights' attorneys didn't return calls seeking comment.

A privileged life

Motzenbecker's passion for affordable housing seems unlikely. Her father, Thomas Kenny, grew up poor, only to become a successful entrepreneur, owning Kenny Press in Newark.

It afforded his daughter a privileged life. She grew up in Short Hills and spent summers in Spring Lake, where she remembers socializing at the Essex and Sussex Hotel, sneaking into the Ritz Theater for shows and dancing into the night at the Monmouth Hotel.

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She went to college at Chestnut Hill College, a private school in Philadelphia, but she said she wasn't a very good student. And she met her future husband, Paul Motzenbecker, during a family vacation in Florida.

The two had four children: Paul Jr., Susan, Beth and Douglas. Her husband worked as a marketing and sales executive for JP Stevens, a textiles manufacturer in Manhattan, and they continued to live in Short Hills with summers in Spring Lake.

(Paul Jr., the oldest, died of colon cancer in 2006 at the age of 48. "That's the only hardship I've had in my life," Helen said.)

Motzenbecker began to buy investment properties in what sounded more like a hobby than a full-time job.

For her, though, the turning point came during the Newark riots in 1967, when she became outraged by stories of Black residents being subjected to police brutality. She began working at a day care center in Newark, watching parents drop their children off early in the morning and then head to their jobs in the suburbs.

She wondered why those parents didn't move to the suburbs to be closer to their jobs, before reaching a conclusion: They couldn't afford the housing, and towns' zoning regulations helped keep it that way.

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'The resilience to see it through'

Motzenbecker jumped into a brewing fight. In the 1970s and '80s, the New Jersey Supreme Court and the New Jersey Legislature prodded municipalities to provide their fair share of affordable housing. But elected leaders were slow to comply, Motzenbecker said.

"When my mom believes in something as strongly as she believes in fair housing, it is very hard to convince her otherwise," said Beth Keeler, her youngest daughter and a Fair Haven resident. "This is an issue that has mattered to her for decades. She knows change takes time and has the resilience to see it through.”

Motzenbecker put the law to the test with an 8-acre parcel in Bernardsville that she pitched for affordable housing. She trekked to meetings, often with her children in tow to argue her case, while the town stood opposed to the plan.

Motzenbecker filed a lawsuit against Bernardsville in 1983. To pay for her lawyer, she and Paul sold their Short Hills home and moved to their Spring Lake home full time. Four years later, the Council on Affordable Housing, the agency that at the time oversaw the law, awarded Motzenbecker the first builder's remedy in the state, Surenian said.

"In this instance we have a municipality that has had ample opportunity to create a realistic plan and has failed to do so," COAH ruled. "However, we also have a property owner who is committed to (the) provision of low- and moderate-income housing."

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One last battle

Motzenbecker continued her advocacy after her husband died in 2015, turning her attention closer to home. After Spring Lake opposed her plan for a three-story building on Morris Avenue — stores on the ground floor, condominiums above — Motzenbecker threatened to file a lawsuit. The two sides reached a settlement in 2016.

Four years later, Motzenbecker couldn't see, hear or walk as well as she used to, but she geared up again, perhaps for one last time, with the same passion she had 40 years earlier.

She bought a home that previously belonged to Robert T. Merriken Sr., an embattled Spring Lake Heights councilman who died in 2020. She said the home was in disarray and needed to be demolished. She gathered engineers and lawyers, took out a home-equity loan to pay for it. And she mapped out a new development that included an affordable unit.

Motzenbecker thinks she has made her point. And she said she hopes Spring Lake Heights and other towns will take their affordable housing obligations seriously.

"If I wasn't 94, I would go into other towns and keep doing it, if I could," Motzenbecker said.

Michael L. Diamond is a business reporter who has been writing about the New Jersey economy and health care industry for more than 20 years. He can be reached at mdiamond@gannettnj.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: NJ affordable housing built by woman, 94, who beats towns in court