Connecticut’s housing crisis and, in particular its affordable housing crisis, is among the many pressing issues the Connecticut General Assembly will take up during its 2025-2026 legislative session. But if history is any guide on this topic, this session will be like all its predecessors – the same proposals will be reintroduced, and mostly defeated.
The arguments between housing advocates on the one hand, and “local control” champions on the other will follow a familiar script. Hearings will be held. Testimony will be offered. Bills will be advanced. And at the end of the session, nothing of any real significance will have been accomplished on the housing front.
The breadth and depth of this issue has been described in detail elsewhere, and the desire to confront it expressed by elected officials at the state and local level for years. Yet the failure of our state to produce the needed amount of housing to support a growing economy persists. Why? It’s not because there is not sufficient capital available to finance development. It’s not because there isn’t a supply of building materials to be had. It isn’t because there are not enough architects, structural engineers, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, or other tradespeople willing and able to design and build the needed housing. It’s surely not because of lack of demand.
It’s because local land use authorities stand in the way. (The reasons they do, in many towns quite successfully, is another question entirely.)
Connecticut is divided into 169 cities and towns, the boundaries of which were sometimes established by rivers, streams or other bodies of water, but are largely arbitrary. The power to regulate what can be built within those cities and towns was handed over to them by the state statue essentially from the moment that the power to regulate land use was declared legal in 1926 – in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co.
“Euclidean” zoning, as approved by the court, aspires to guide land use development in ways most beneficial to the local economy, the environment, and the health and welfare of the population. It generally accounts for the need for different kinds of development, such as industrial, commercial, retail, and residential uses, and different intensities of development, such as single family homes, or multi-family apartments, based on existing conditions like environmental sensitivity, infrastructure availability and other factors. But these existing conditions, and the impacts of development, are not contained within the confines of the arbitrary boundaries of individual cities and towns. They are regional.
What is often lost in debates on this issue, and comes as something of a surprise to many people, is the legal fact that the cities and towns of Connecticut have only the powers the General Assembly grants to them by statute. The power to regulate land use within localities was handed down to the local level by the General Assembly, and it could legally be taken back and exercised at the state level. But the “We don’t want Hartford to tell us what to do” sentiment is strong, and the wholesale recall of this authority to the state level is a political impossibility, except in limited measure.
One such limited measure is known as Section 8-30g (referring to its designation under the Connecticut General Statutes). This law permits a developer to force local authorities to override local land use ordinances and allow development that will provide affordable housing – in towns or municipalities that cannot demonstrate at least 10% of the housing in that locality qualifies as “affordable” by state standards. (Today, only 29 cities or towns meet this threshold and are exempt from this rule.) Section 8-30g, to put it mildly, is somewhat of a blunt instrument. It subverts the very notion of rational land use planning, while also having demonstrated itself to be of quite limited effectiveness – a kind of “lose-lose” situation.
The battle between the statewide desire to increase the supply and affordability of housing, versus locals’ desire to keep their town just the way it is, has been going on for a while now without the construction of nearly enough housing. It isn’t working, and it’s time to try new ways of balancing state and regional needs in a way that clears the path for much needed housing. It is time to approach land use planning in Connecticut on a more regional level, in which the cities and towns participate in the development of concrete, enforceable regional land use plans.
In the 1980s, Councils of Government (COGs) were established in Connecticut, one for each of nine regions. They are directed by state statute with developing a Plan of Conservation and Development for each region, and they contain extensive data about their regions and recommend where housing, and other uses, are best suited pursuant to good planning practices. But these recommendations are merely aspirational. The COGs have no legal means to ensure that the cities and towns within that region, under their local land use ordinances will permit, for instance, the higher density housing necessary to address the affordable housing shortage that a Regional Plan recommends.
If there is a rational, fair, and possibly effective way to plan for and implement the development of the housing that the state requires to maintain its economic health and its quality of life and affordability, the COGs are the place to do it. This is not Hartford telling the localities what to do, but the cities and towns themselves coming together within a region and deciding their future for themselves. But those plans need to have real teeth.
The law should require that every city and town’s own Plan of Conservation and Development be consistent with the Regional Plan, and that its local land use ordinances also be consistent. Further, it should empower landowners and developers to petition the Superior Court to override local ordinances if they do not comply with the Regional Plan (which the locality has participated in creating). This is a much more rational, fair, and effective way to site and construct housing, including affordable housing, without the valid objections many people have to Section 8-30g.
There are many details to be worked out in order to make this kind of approach effective and palatable. But what we’ve been doing so far hasn’t worked and, if as a state we are serious about addressing this issue, it’s time to try something new.
Peter O’Connor of Mystic is a lawyer and former state and local government official.