Asbury Park Zoning Board rules converting rooming houses to apartments requires a variance

The Asbury Park Zoning Board of Adjustment ruled on June 9 that converting a rooming or boarding house into a multifamily apartment constitutes a change in use under the city zoning ordinance and therefore requires a variance, the board said after hearing legal arguments and staff testimony.

The board’s decision follows competing presentations: Andrew Carris, attorney for 5154 LLC, argued that New Jersey case law (including Wagner and Lehan and later citations) supports treating internal renovations that add kitchens and bathrooms without expanding the building footprint as a non-substantial alteration that does not require variance relief. “You’re adding facilities, but you’re not increasing or enlarging the facilities in and of itself,” Carris told the board, arguing that precedent permits such conversions when the square footage does not increase.

Michelle Alonso, the city’s director of planning and redevelopment and the zoning officer of record, told the board the municipality’s ordinance and state law draw a firm distinction between rooming/boarding houses and multifamily dwelling units. Alonso said rooming houses do not provide individual kitchen and sanitation facilities, are treated as often transitory under statute, require state licensing and inspections, and are handled differently in municipal rules for parking, tenant registration, trash, building inspections and taxation. “The big difference in our definitions is that boarding house or rooming house does not have kitchen and bathroom facilities,” Alonso said, adding that treating the two uses as identical would remove a set of regulatory checks the city applies to multifamily housing.

Board members pressed both legal and practical questions, including whether local ordinance sections beyond the two unit definitions should control, how occupancy assumptions in the cited cases affect intensity-of-use analysis, and the effect on municipal services such as parking and waste collection. Board members repeatedly noted that the city’s code lists different parking requirements for multifamily units (ranging by zone from about 0.99 to 2 spaces per unit) while there is no comparable parking standard for rooming houses.

After discussion the board voted to adopt the interpretation that a rooming and boarding house and a multifamily apartment dwelling are not similar under Asbury Park’s zoning ordinance and that converting one to the other constitutes a change in use requiring variance approval. Several members said their votes rested on the cumulative municipal distinctions — inspections, tenant registration, taxation, parking and construction/building standards — and the potential fiscal and operational impacts of treating the uses identically. The motion notes that the board was interpreting the ordinance as written and did not set a specific numeric threshold for unit counts; the board also emphasized that enlargements of building footprint remain a separate consideration.

Chairman Avalone and JJ Hall recused on the 5154 LLC matter; the board recorded the motion, the roll call and the outcome on the public record. No permit was issued as part of the interpretation; applicants seeking to convert an existing boarding or rooming house to multifamily units must pursue the applicable variance process under the ordinance. The board adjourned at the close of the session.

Next steps: the board’s interpretation will serve as precedent for similar applications unless altered by further board action or appealed to court. The city’s zoning officer may apply this interpretation when evaluating future permit applications that propose similar conversions.