Connecticut has an affordable housing problem.

Connecticut has a job vacancy problem.

The two problems, no surprise to many, go together, according to advocates for housing in the state. If people can’t afford to live here, they can’t take the jobs that are available, they say.

And yet, local residents, citing local control, fight against multiple-unit developments coming into their towns.

That has changed in one small town, with what the state of Connecticut has called a “first-of-its-kind” development for the town.

On May 13, a 46-unit affordable development opened in Orange with much fanfare, including an appearance by Gov. Ned Lamont. Orange, a town comprised of a farming past and mostly single-family homes, with its retail and business corridor purposely confined mostly to Route 1, previously had 1.31% affordable housing. The town has housing set aside for seniors and has changed dramatically in some places within the past 25 years, including with many apartments built near the border with West Haven. Not unlike other towns, there have been vocal objections to affordable housing in the past.

Orange First Selectman James Zeoli said the affordable project was accepted by residents because it was “very tastefully done.”

A small CT town accepted a ‘first-of-its-kind’ affordable housing project. It’s a positive step in a state that needs 120,000 units.

“Sometimes when people hear this type of (affordable) title put onto a development, it draws sideways looks, sometimes inappropriate comments and stuff,” he said. “So the developer, one of the principals, lives right near it. It provides a need for both people with disabilities, special needs and income needs. They’re designed quite beautifully.”

The project was developed by Gyroscope Development Group and the units were offered by Lascana Homes. The units are totally filled and even the waiting list is closed.

“One thing that’s very important that people forget: Not every town can fit what I’ll call appropriate affordable housing, because not everybody is able to drive or owns a car or has people nearby that can help them all the time,” Zeoli said.

“This development is … probably within 5-600 feet of the Route 1,” he said.

“It’s nestled in a neighborhood and yet it offers the availability of transit with busing,” he said. “It has sewer access … It has gas and it has shopping and other needs that people might have, and so it makes it available, being that it’s in that proximity and offers all those amenities.”

The site of the development is about 5 acres and, according to zoning documents, was mostly unimproved and had
consisted of wooded area, with single family homes in the area, and a “variety” of commercial uses to the southeast/ east, including a fence company, health care center, a restaurant and a credit union. “A heavily wooded area with wetlands serves as a buffer between the site and the single-family homes to the northeast,” the zoning document noted.

The project was done with support from the Connecticut Department of Housing and the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority.

Zoning documents said the project was seven buildings and 92 parking spaces. A key is that connects to sanitary sewers in a residential town largely served by septic tanks. The quiet site, not far from the Post Road, is landscaped with new shrubbery but also surrounded by trees in an established neighborhood.

More work to do in Connecticut

While Orange, with its population of about 14,000 people, has made a positive step, the Open Communities Alliance would like to bring a Fair Share plan for planning and zoning to the entire state.

“We’re missing about 120,000 units of affordable housing,” said Erin Boggs, executive director of the Open Communities Alliance, which advocates for affordable housing.

“Rents have been skyrocketing for a long time; our homelessness numbers are way up; our housing production numbers are way down,” she said. “We have between 90,000 and 100,000 jobs that are vacant, and a lot of those vacancies are tied to potential employees not having places to live in Connecticut, so it doesn’t sound worth it for them to come here. It’s both a social justice crisis but also an economic crisis.”

There’s simply a lack of housing inventory throughout the state in general, sometimes as low as a 1% vacancy rate in a given town, said Hugh Bailey, policy director for the alliance.

“There just aren’t units available,” Bailey said. “And those units that are available are subject to bidding wars. That price gets much higher than the initial asking price. And the jobs available might support someone paying in a place that has the asking price but, once it’s gone on the market and it goes up, it no longer becomes viable.”

The problem is statewide and particularly acute in places where there are jobs, such as Groton, where Electric Boat recently had $1 billion restored in a draft spending bill for a second Virginia-class attack submarine.

“It’s very clear right there that this mismatch is the case where they don’t have the housing for the jobs that they need filled,” Boggs said.

“You can also see acute need in more expensive places,” she said. “In Fairfield County, the possibility of finding housing that’s affordable outside of Bridgeport and in Norwalk (and) Stamford, but even in those places it can be incredibly hard. It’s basically impossible outside of those cities.”

But the alliance has done analyses for each region of the state, and the problem is present everywhere, she said.

According to the alliance, there are 28 cities and towns that have at least 10% affordable housing, generally meaning rent is no more than 30% of monthly income.

Of the rest, many have minuscule percentages of affordable housing, less than 1%.

While a city like New Haven has been including affordable housing in a number of new developments, “we shouldn’t be expecting New Haven to do it all by itself; they’re not going to solve the housing crisis standing alone,” Boggs said.

“And that is what we really focus on, which is what our whole region’s doing. What are suburban areas, even rural areas doing to play a role in addressing the crisis, and part of that comes through adjusting planning and zoning so that they are actually complying with existing state law that says they need to be playing a role in solving the regional housing crises and allowing housing of all different kinds to go in.”

Part of the law that municipal zoning boards must follow is the Zoning Enabling Act, Section 8-2 of the state code, which, among other things, requires them to “Promote housing choice and economic diversity in housing, including housing for both low and moderate income households.”

It also calls for the “the development of housing opportunities, including opportunities for multifamily dwellings.”

“These are existing obligations that towns have already agreed to,” Boggs said. “For some people, there’s just not an understanding that that’s how it works.”

Going along with Section 8-2 is Section 8-30g, the Affordable Housing Appeals Act, “which says for any town that has less than 10% affordable housing, if a developer comes along proposing a development with a meaningful percentage of affordability, and the town rejects that, the developer can take the town to court and basically get a leg up in court,” Boggs said. “And the town can then be ordered to allow the affordable housing to be built.”

Towns “not held to account”

The problem is that 10% affordable housing in a town is not nearly enough.

“If every town in Connecticut were to allow you to get to that 10% number … we would have about 41,000 additional units of affordable housing, when we need something in the range of 120,000,” Boggs said.

But even the laws on the books aren’t being enforced, Bailey said.

“These laws exist and it’s very plain language that says the towns have to do this, but they are not held to account, which is one of the things that’s frustrating because it’s a very clear law,” he said.

“So when towns talk about local control, certainly local control is traditionally Connecticut, but state laws also exist,” he said. “And they need to abide by those laws, and the fact that they aren’t doesn’t mean that the law doesn’t exist. It just means it’s not being enforced.”

This year, a bill, Senate Bill 6, was introduced in the General Assembly that would have helped increase the affordable housing supply in the state, but it was never voted on.

Boggs said a Fair Share plan would basically assess “how much affordable housing we need in each region of the state, and then allocates that out to each town in a way that considers their resources and also what they’ve done in the past and then asks them to plan and zone for that over a period of time.”

“So it could be 10 years, could be 20 years. But the bottom line is they have to change their zoning to try to reach their number and there are actual sticks that are imposed if the housing does not appear,” she said.

First, Section 8-30g would be imposed. 

“If they ultimately can’t, (if) the housing doesn’t come to fruition, then some basically default zoning goes into place, so very low scale,” Boggs said. “On sewer (connections), you could build 10 units. In places without sewer, you could build up to what the public health code would allow.”

That might be a duplex, triplex or quadruplex, she said. 

“And this is something, broadly speaking along these lines, that is in place and has been in place in New Jersey for a long time and it has been the most effective law in the nation in creating more affordable housing. It’s working incredibly well there,” Boggs said.

Bailey said enforcement mechanisms are necessary because incentives, such as tax breaks, don’t seem to work.

“There are many in Connecticut that will look at those carrots and say, well, thanks for the offer, but we like things the way they are and, nothing,” he said. “So in terms of the carrot-vs.-stick debate, carrots are great and incentives can be helpful, but you really need some sort of enforcement mechanism to ensure that something gets built.”  

Also, the towns don’t need to build the housing themselves, they just need to allow developers to come in and build projects, Bailey said. “They would just have to stop saying no to everything,” he said.

Ultimately, “the town really does need to be more of a partner in this. They need to change the underlying zoning, not just on a one-off basis,” Boggs said. Capitulating on a Section 8-30g case isn’t the way to go.

“Right now, the way towns plan in many cases for affordability is, how do we not have it?” Boggs said. “So it shifts the conversation for not will we have affordable housing or not, but we need to have it, where does it go? How are we going to do this in a way that works well with our vision?” 

Ed Stannard can be reached at estannard@courant.com.