Hundreds of people testified Tuesday on a slew of bills aimed at protecting Connecticut tenants, including measures to reform eviction law and others that would limit how much landlords can charge for a security deposit and what crimes can be considered when renters apply to live in an apartment.
Tuesday’s public hearing put two of the Housing Committee’s most politically difficult subject areas on display: zoning and landlord-tenant relationships.
In the marathon public hearing that promised to continue well into the night Tuesday, lawmakers on the committee heard testimony from tenants, landlords, housing advocates, justice advocates and local officials about the state’s housing crisis, ways to keep renters in their homes and how to encourage more housing construction.
The committee had a packed agenda with 26 bills to discuss and close to 300 people signed up to speak. Most of the bills focused on regulating the landlord-tenant relationship, and one would aim to increase the number of apartments built across the state by requiring towns to plan and zone for a set number of units of housing.
Several Democrats on the committee were supportive of many of the proposals, citing rising rents and the lack of housing in Connecticut.
“The things that people need, and the way that we are living is not keeping up with that 30% [rent increase],” said Housing Committee co-chair Rep. Antonio Felipe, D-Bridgeport.
Republicans expressed reluctance about allowing the government to regulate the housing market by intervening in the landlord-tenant relationship. Some said they feared that more regulation of landlords would push them to remove their properties from the rental market.
“There’s a market force that’s at play in housing as well,” said Rep. Steve Weir, R-Glastonbury. “So if we’re manipulating that, the forces here, by setting … boundaries by which people can operate, it can drive down that competition. It can drive down the choice that people have.”
Recent research has shown that Connecticut lacks at least 110,000 units of housing to meet the population’s need, and that the state has the tightest housing market in the country. The costs to purchase and rent a home have gone up in recent years.
Homelessness has also increased, and thousands are paying high percentages of their income to housing costs.
As the need for more housing grows, state lawmakers have worked to address it, although progress has been slow. Republicans have staunchly opposed many past proposals to reform zoning or offer more protections to tenants, and the Democratic caucus is split in its support.
But earlier this session, in a show of unity, Democratic leadership from the House and Senate gathered to announce that housing would be one of their top priorities this session.
Following Tuesday’s public hearing, the bills still have a long way to go before becoming law. They’ll need to pass committee vote, then receive approval from the House and Senate before heading to the governor’s desk.
No-fault eviction
House Bill 6889 would largely end what are called no-fault evictions, which typically occur at the end of a lease. These make up about 11% of evictions annually in Connecticut.
Certain populations, including people with disabilities and senior citizens, already have this protection, and the bill would expand that to include people living in buildings with five or more units. Landlords could still file evictions against people who miss rental payments or violate the terms of their lease, among other causes.
Housing advocates this session have been united behind the proposal, and have traveled to Hartford in droves to speak at press conferences and to lawmakers about the issue.
“We live and work with you every day,” said Hannah Srajer, president of the Connecticut Tenants Union. “We drive the buses you take to work, we fix your cars, we deliver your mail. We are carpenters, we are builders, we are building inspectors, we are CNAs, we are nurses. We lead Bible studies.
“We are your neighbors, and we represent every corner of this state.”
Tenants told lawmakers that the no-fault evictions have been used often as a retaliation tactic when renters complain about their living conditions or try to form tenant unions. It’s also been used to evict people en masse when a new owner purchases a building and wants to raise the rent.
“If it’s not in your districts, it is coming for your districts,” Srajer said of mass evictions.
Landlord groups objected to the bill, among others discussed Tuesday, saying it would make it harder to evict problem tenants. Dondre Roberts, a member of the Connecticut Apartment Association and New Haven landlord, said when tenants cause problems at the complex, such as harassing apartment staff or being too noisy, it can be hard to prove.
He said the no-fault evictions make it easier not to renew someone’s lease.
“A lease is a contract with a start date and an end date,” Roberts said.
Criminal charges
House Bill 6948 would limit landlords’ ability to consider rental applicants’ criminal records when deciding whether to rent to them. A similar bill, alongside the eviction legislation, was debated last year.
H.B. 6948 would officially label it discrimination to inquire about a rental applicant’s criminal history during the initial application process. Landlords would have to extend a conditional offer of tenancy before asking about criminal records.
And they would have to consider factors such as how long ago the crime occurred and how serious it was if they wanted to withdraw the conditional offer. There are exceptions for violent crimes such as murder, rape and certain gun-related crimes.
Over the summer, a New Haven couple filed a lawsuit against a property management company that allegedly denied them housing because of a decades-old misdemeanor. The management company settled with them last week.
“Criminal records do not define a person,” said Amy Eppler-Epstein, a legal aid attorney who represented the couple.
The Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities supported the bill, citing what attorneys said were thousands of reports of discrimination and saying it would bring housing law up to speed with other statewide civil rights law on issues such as employment.
Landlords also opposed this bill, saying it would inhibit their ability to keep their tenants safe.
“Protected class status was intended to protect persons from discrimination because of innate characteristics that they were born with, like race, color sex, gender etc. I don’t believe that extending the protection to a chosen behavior, such as becoming justice involved, should be included,” said John Souza, president of the Connecticut Coalition of Property Owners, in written testimony.
DOH proposals
The Department of Housing also testified on a couple of its own proposals including one that would instruct fair rent commissions to consider rent increases above 10% in the first year after someone buys a property to be excessive, unless the new owner has done major renovations.
This aims to keep new, corporate landlords from raising rents beyond what the existing tenants can afford.
The department also has a proposal to limit the amount that landlords can charge for a security deposit to one month, so that getting into a new home will be more affordable.
DOH Commissioner Seila Mosquera-Bruno’s exchange with ranking member Sen. Rob Sampson, R-Wolcott, highlighted one of the widest divides between Republicans and Democrats in Connecticut when discussing the housing crisis.
Sampson has questioned how real the housing crisis is in past meetings, and on Tuesday he questioned Mosquera-Bruno’s reasons behind supporting the bills.
“It’s nothing more than you feel that rents are too high and you want to help people?” Sampson said.
“It’s not a feeling,” Mosquera-Bruno replied. “It’s a reality.”
“I understand that, but it’s your opinion that rents are too high, and you want to help people,” Sampson said.
“It’s the reality that people are paying a lot of rent and they cannot afford it,” she said.
Zoning
Lawmakers also heard testimony on House Bill 6944, which would require towns to include a description of how they’ll plan and zone for a set number of units in their affordable housing plans required under state statute 8-30j.
The units planned would need to include a mix in the number of bedrooms and affordability level. The plans are required every five years, and towns would have to show that they’re making changes to zoning within a year of submitting the plan.
Erin Boggs, executive director of the Open Communities Alliance, said that if towns feel they can’t meet the goals, they could submit their reasoning to the state. The alliance is one of the organizations leading the charge to advocate for the proposal.
Many town officials have said they don’t have the infrastructure to support more housing. The numbers would be based on an idea known as “fair share,” which divides up regional housing need among municipalities and aims to cut down on segregation.
“It will create housing that we have needed here in Connecticut for decades,” Boggs said. “It will support the environment and transit-oriented development. Ultimately it will boost our economy.”
The idea of fair share has been floated in past legislative sessions and faced fierce opposition from local officials and others who said it would dilute local control and impose one-size-fits-all solutions on towns with unique needs.
Boggs said the new proposal aims to give towns more control over where they want to build and offers them a chance to tell the state what support they need to build more housing.
“Towns are not judged on whether the housing is getting built … it’s about whether the planning has happened and the zoning has been changed,” Boggs said.
Rep. Tina Courpas, R-Greenwich, questioned whether the proposal was too similar to past sessions’ ideas and would “leapfrog right into the fair share dialogue.”
Betsy Gara, executive director of the Connecticut Council of Small Towns, said in written testimony that the proposal would complicate a process that was already difficult for many municipalities.
“Rather than build on these planning efforts, HB-6944 imposes sweeping requirements on affordable housing plans to incorporate ‘fair share’ housing requirements in ways that will subject municipalities to costly, protracted lawsuits, driving up property taxes and making housing less affordable,” Gara wrote.