This is the second of a five-part series exploring issues surrounding Connecticut’s affordable housing needs. Part One is here.
After 40 years of attending hearings about affordable housing proposals, I conclude that opposition to and discrimination against lower-income households persists, and arises in part from myths and misconceptions.
Some of the opposition is based on a lightly veiled perception that those who will reside in proposed housing will be of a different color from, or will not share the lifestyle and values of, existing residents. At hearings at which higher density housing is advanced, opponents often talk about impacts to the “character” of the town or a neighborhood; what they mean is changes in race, ethnicity, or median household income.
Uglier, common stereotypes are that low income households will burden public schools with special needs children, and will introduce crime and drug use where it does not exist today.
But as much as race or class, I think the desire to prevent affordable proposals is based on economics and envy – the belief that affordable programs are government handouts, an affront to those who have “worked hard” to be able to move to a more desirable neighborhood.
The implication is that lower-income households per se are detrimental to communities and unworthy of government help in finding an affordable home. This opinion, in my view, is baseless and reprehensible. Difficulty finding an affordable housing place results from a variety of factors, including the legacy of discrimination that was lawful through about half of the 1900s; the less obvious discriminatory regulatory practices that have taken the place of patent exclusion; the already high and increasing costs of renting or owning; and the reality that many people also “work hard” but are not compensated at levels commensurate with housing costs. I am referring to first responders, teachers, public employees, and blue collar workers, to name a few.
“Cost burdened” households are often the elderly or disabled, those confronted by unexpected calamities such as crushing medical bills, and young adults who are just starting out. Opponents of affordable housing reform essentially advocate that those who already live in a town are entitled to use the zoning power to prevent new construction to serve these populations. But reforming exclusionary zoning should not be considered charity, but as government correcting existing laws that have resulted in a shortage of essential housing.
And then there are the myths purveyed by those who want to use zoning to exclude others, such as:
Affordable housing lowers neighboring property values. Study after study has disproved this;
Multi-family housing is incompatible with single-family housing – both uses are residential;
Affordable housing is only high-density apartments – in fact, there are many sizes and styles;
“Zoning is a promise” – a legally incorrect statement, because buying land or a house does not protect anyone from use changes or impose an implicit restriction on the use of nearby properties; and
“Our town is open to everyone who can afford to live here” – a claim that ignores the fact that lack of affordability is the result of local regulation that has pumped up housing costs.
Proponents of local choice and maintaining the existing structure of zoning often contend that if towns are left alone, they will respond to local and regional affordable housing needs.
This is contradicted by at least three facts. First, as explained in my first article, our balkanized land use system institutionalizes parochial decisions and impedes consideration of regional needs. Second, in 1989, the legislature adopted § 8-30g precisely because the Blue Ribbon Commission documented that towns, left alone, were not responding to lower cost housing needs. Third, in 2022-23, my Working Group reviewed affordable housing plans prepared by 90 percent of the towns and concluded that most of the plans, after acknowledging the need, conspicuously declined specifics about regulation revisions, locations for affordable units, and concrete steps and timetables.
Given a chance just two years ago to formulate meaningful affordable housing plans, the vast majority of towns did not deliver.
There is also a persistent misconception about our state’s “goal” for affordable housing. This error arises from a misunderstanding of General Statutes § 8-30g, the affordable housing law, which requires municipal zoning commissions, when they deny certain affordable proposals and the property owner appeals to court, to prove a substantial public health or safety reason to justify the denial.
Section 8-30g exempts towns in which at least ten percent of the housing units are counted by the State as government-subsidized or subject to long-term rent or price restrictions. As a result of this exemption, it is often said that “the state’s goal” for towns is for them to achieve ten percent affordability, after which the town has satisfied its affordable housing obligation.
This is incorrect. “Affordable housing” is generally units within the economic means of households earning 80 percent or less of the state’s “median income,” the statistical midpoint of all household incomes (and paying no more than 30 percent of their income for housing). In 2024, the statewide median in Connecticut for a four-person household is $122,000. But those earning 80 percent or less of the median income are about 40 percent of the population! It is not, and never has been, state policy that a town in which only ten percent of its housing is affordable to 40 percent of the population has met a state-established quota and has no more responsibility.
Zoning, being a function of government, is of course political, and thus at times features sharp elbows. While this will always persist, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out how affordable housing development is sometimes a contact sport – and one that often causes builders, developers, and lenders to take a long look before proceeding with a development application.
Too often, opponents of affordable development describe an application review as pitting defenseless citizens against “predatory developers,” with local regulators, pure of heart and dedicated only to the public interest, given the thankless job of mediating. Nonsense. In my experience, there are people of all types and stripes on all sides of the development process. Nor does money regularly overcome opposition. These labels are inaccurate and meaningless.
Yet, permit applicants often need to beware misuses of public power, office, and responsibility. Some recent examples: Sewer commissions that hide available capacity so it can’t be used to support affordable units. Neighbors who tell commissions that no new development can be allowed because the local roads are “dangerous,” even though they themselves have never complained. Fire departments that demand greater dimensions for things like fire lanes only for affordable developments. Town staff who demand, only for lower-cost housing, more expensive stormwater management or construction practices than the building or fire codes require. Towns that buy developable land only to prevent it from becoming housing, or adopt mandatory inclusionary zoning with rules that guarantee less housing production. Commissions that adopt regulations for affordable housing that include requirements that they know can’t be met. Towns that intentionally file inaccurate reports with the state about their existing housing stock. Towns that deny a wetlands permit for a multi-unit plan, and then approve a mansion that obliterates the same wetland. And so on.
In fairness, in recent years, a small but growing number of local commissions have embraced affordable housing as a societal need they must use their authority to accommodate, adopted revised regulations, and approved units, mainly apartments. But too many applications are still battles against the power that the state has given local commissions to exclude and deny.
As to myths to be exposed and interred, there is also the claim that “§8-30g has been a failure.” The proponents of this narrative are mainly legislators and officials from more affluent towns who assert that the law hasn’t produced sufficient affordable units, and that few towns have achieved the state goal of ten percent affordability.
Well, as noted earlier, ten percent is not a state goal. Meanwhile, over 34 years, § 8-30g has produced directly at least 28,000 housing units, about 7,000 of which are government subsidized (such as through federal Low Income Housing Tax Credits) or formally deed-restricted to specified maximum rents or sales prices; and indirectly, the program has spurred many more units, in part by inducing commissions to approve affordable developments just so they can say they did so, and by demonstrating that affordable housing can be attractive and safe and not the threat that was predicted.
The hypocrisy of towns most critical of § 8-30g is that they are mainly those that have few affordable units and have made little progress since the 1980s due to their own exclusionary regulations and practices and visceral opposition to multi-family housing. Emblematic of the hostility is the zoning commissioner who recently described a proposal to extend a sewer line to facilitate an affordable development as “being asked to bring rope to a hanging;” and the first selectman (of a different town) who asserted that a plan for apartments, with 30 percent of its units affordable, would be an “existential threat” to the town – not due to traffic, architecture, or stormwater, but because of the incomes of one third of the proposed residents.
The point is that local land use proceedings involving affordable housing are still too often resisted, not based on planning or impacts, but on myths and misconceptions about “those people” moving in.
As we try to find a better legislated balance between state mandates and local choice in our affordable housing laws and programs, it is essential that we also identify, acknowledge, and put aside the myths, misconceptions, and false narratives that hinder the discussion.
Tomorrow: Environmental protection and other issues affecting CT affordable housing.