I was heartened to hear about the Connecticut Apartment Association’s recent press conference in support of multifamily housing initiatives. To quote New Haven landlord Dondré Roberts: “Our message is simple and direct: Connecticut needs to make it easier to develop and build multi-family housing affordably now.”
As the housing crisis has come to a breaking point in Connecticut, we’ve seen a diverse coalition across the state come together and reinforce the need to invest in more, and more affordable, housing. Not only housing and homelessness advocates, but also healthcare workers, domestic violence advocates, childcare workers, the Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Connecticut (HBRA), and the Connecticut Business and Industry Association (CBIA), to name a few.
It is rare for one issue to be so unifying, but the message is clear for the upcoming legislative session: we need more housing now.
The Lamont administration and many legislators proudly point to the $800 million in bonding authorized in the last biennial budget for housing initiatives, including Time to Own (the state’s down payment assistance program), Build for CT (the state’s middle-income housing construction program), and other affordable housing construction programs. The Department of Housing has done an admirable job ramping up these programs and putting bonding money into action. As the apartment association has pointed out, these funds could be more impactful if coupled with meaningful zoning and regulatory reform to increase housing supply and bring rental and mortgage costs down.
These investments in housing construction are necessary, but not sufficient.
Alongside their call for promoting housing supply policies, the landlord group “called for lawmakers to stop focusing on landlord-tenant issues” and to focus on “the root of the problem – the lack of housing.”
I reject this binary framing.
While improving housing supply will ultimately improve affordability across all income levels, decades of under-building mean it will take years to build ourselves out of this crisis. Unfortunately, there are people struggling right now that cannot wait years to see the return on our investment. While the rental market remains tight and expensive, we need more robust tenant protections.
Critics claim that tenant protections are bad for the economy and interfere with a private contract between landlord and renter. Let’s step back in time with these critiques and compare the housing market to the labor market.
Were child labor laws bad for profits by removing a cheap source of labor? Was the eight-hour workday a constraint on factory output? Did the creation of federal workplace standards require additional costs of doing business related to safety training and facility maintenance, thereby preventing tragedies like the factory fire in 1911 where 146 workers died?
The government stepped in to regulate the private market because people believed that individuals participating in a system were more important than the system itself. Business and industry leaders fought bitterly against each of these protections using similar arguments – bad for business, government interference. But advocates and political leaders accepted a threshold of human dignity that must be protected under the law.
We are at the same crossroads now where the leaders in Connecticut need to decide what threshold of human dignity for tenants they will require.
Under our current laws, it is legal to evict a family with young children when their contract runs out simply to renovate and turn a higher profit on the home. This can cause massive disruptions as the children may be forced to move to a new school district or, in more extreme cases, into a homeless shelter. Research shows that evictions early in a child’s life can lead to long-term physical and mental health issues, as well as cognitive and behavioral challenges. In the 2023-24 school year, 5,463 Connecticut students experienced homelessness, up 70% in the past 10 years. A full 50% of these children (2,733) are PreK-5th grade students. They cannot lose their childhood waiting on housing construction.
Under our current laws, it is legal to evict a tenant by non-renewal of contract if they file a complaint with the city health department after repeated maintenance requests for mold, water damage, or rodent issues go unattended by absentee landlords. By allowing eviction without cause, many renters are forced to choose between living in unsafe situations or facing retaliation when they seek protection.
There has been a 24% increase in “no fault” evictions in Connecticut over the past five years. Evictions have traumatic and lasting effects on families. Evictions worsen housing insecurity, increase homelessness, and make communities less stable, cohesive, and safe. Tenants with month-to-month leases can be evicted with only 30 days notice – leaving no time to find replacement housing. People of color, families with young children, and renters with disabilities are often the target of no-fault evictions. Connecticut’s Black and Latine renters are two to three times more likely to be evicted than white renters.
This is a question of human dignity.
In 2025, the Connecticut General Assembly will once again have the chance to vote to expand Just Cause Protections. Currently, the law prohibits no-fault evictions against renters who are 62+ years old or have a disability and live in a building with five or more units. This year, SB 143 proposed protecting all tenants other than those who live in owner-occupied one- to four- unit buildings, but it was never acted on by the Senate.
These expanded protections balance the rights of tenants and landlords. Landlords are still permitted to evict tenants in cases of nonpayment of rent, violating the lease, or refusing to agree to a reasonable rent increase. Small landlords who rent out parts of their own home (single family home, duplex, or quad) would not be impacted by Just Cause expansion.
I do not accept the argument that landlord-tenant issues are a distraction from the real housing issues. They are a crucial part of the human consequences of our underinvestment in housing. We must do both: invest in housing creation and protect vulnerable renters in our state. Anything less abandons our values as a state to protect and uplift human dignity.
Alysha Gardner is a Senior Policy Analyst for Partnership for Strong Communities.