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.
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.”
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.
It’s a scheme made famous by a nearly 30-year-old episode of the sitcom Seinfeld.
Hoping to earn a quick buck, two characters load a mail truck full of soda bottles and beer cans purchased with a redeemable 5-cent deposit in New York, before traveling to Michigan, where they can be recycled for 10 cents apiece. With few thousand cans, they calculate, the trip will earn a decent profit. In the end, the plan fell apart.
But after Connecticut raised the value of its own bottle deposits to 10 cents in 2024, officials say, they were caught off guard by a flood of such fraudulent returns coming in from out of state. Redemption rates have reached 97%, and some beverage distributors have reported millions of dollars in losses as a result of having to pay out for excess returns of their products.
On Thursday, state lawmakers passed an emergency bill to crack down on illegal returns by increasing fines, requiring redemption centers to keep track of bulk drop-offs and allowing local police to go after out-of-state violators.
“I’m heartbroken,” said House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, who supported the effort to increase deposits to 10 cents and expand the number of items eligible for redemption. “I spent a lot of political capital to get the bottle bill passed in 2021, and never in a million years did I think that New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island residents would return so many bottles.”
The legislation, Senate Bill 299, would increase fines for violating the bottle bill law from $50 to $500 on a first offense. For third and subsequent offenses, the penalty would increase from $250 to $2,000 and misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison.
In addition, it requires redemption centers to be licensed by the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (previously, those businesses were only required to register with DEEP). As a condition of their license, redemption centers must keep records of anyone seeking to redeem more than 1,000 bottles and cans in a single day.
Anyone not affiliated with a qualified nonprofit would be prohibited from redeeming more than 4,000 bottles a day, down from the previous limit of 5,000.
The bill also seeks to pressure some larger redemption centers into adopting automated scanning technologies, such as reverse vending machines, by temporarily lowering the handling fee that is paid on each beverage container processed by those centers.
The bill easily passed the Senate on Wednesday and the House on Thursday on its way to Gov. Ned Lamont.
While the bill drew bipartisan support, Republicans described it as a temporary fix to a growing problem.
House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, called the switch to 10-cent deposits an “unmitigated disaster” and said he believed out-of-state redemption centers were offloading much of their inventory within Connecticut.
“The sheer quantity that is being redeemed in the state of Connecticut, this isn’t two people putting cans into a post office truck,” Candelora said. “This is far more organized than that.”
The impact of those excess returns is felt mostly by the state’s wholesale beverage distributors, who initiate the redemption process by collecting an additional 10 cents on every eligible bottle and can they sell to supermarkets, liquor stores and other retailers within Connecticut. The distributors are required to pay that money back — plus a handling fee — once the containers are returned to the store or a redemption center.
According to the state’s Department of Revenue Services, nearly 12% of wholesalers reported having to pay out more redemptions than they collected in deposits in 2025. Those losses totaled $11.3 million.
Peter Gallo, the vice president of Star Distributors in West Haven, said his company’s losses alone have totaled more than $2 million since the increase on deposits went into effect two years ago. As time goes on, he said, the deficit has only grown.
“We’re hoping we can get something fixed here, because it’s a tough pill to be holding on to debt that we should get paid for,” Gallo said.
Still, officials say they have no way of tracking precisely how many of the roughly 2 billion containers that were redeemed in the state last year were illegally brought in from other states. That’s because most products lack any kind of identifiable marking indicating where they were sold.
“There’s no way to tell right now. That’s one of the core issues here,” said state Rep. John-Michael Parker, D-Madison, who co-chairs the legislature’s Environment Committee.
Parker said the issue could be solved if product labels were printed with a specific barcode or other feature that would be unique to Connecticut. Such a solution, for now, has faced technological challenges and pushback from the beverage industry, he said.
Not everyone involved in the handling, sorting and redemption of bottles is happy about the upcoming changes — or the process by which they were approved.
Francis Bartolomeo, the owner of a Fran’s Cans and Bart’s Bottles in Watertown, said he was only made aware of the legislation on Monday from a fellow redemption center owner. Since then, he said, he’s been contacting his legislators to oppose the bill and was frustrated by the lack of a public hearing.
“I know other people are as flabbergasted as I am because they don’t know where it comes out of,” Bartolomeo said “It’s a one sided affair, really.”
Bartolomeo said one of his biggest concerns with the bill is the $2,500 annual licensing fee that it would place on redemption centers. While he agreed that out-of-state redemptions are a problem, he said it should be up to the state to improve enforcement.
“We’re cleaning up the mess, and we’re going to end up being penalized,” Bartolomeo said. “Get rid of it and go back to 5 cents if it’s that big of a hindrance, but don’t penalize the redemption centers for what you imposed.”
Lynn Little of New Milford Redemption Center supports the increased penalties but believes the solution ultimately lies with better labeling by the distributors. She is also frustrated by the volume caps after the state initially gave grants to residents looking to open their own bottle redemption businesses.
“They’re taking a volume business, because any business where you make 3 cents per unit (the average handling fee) is a volume business, and limiting the volume we can take in, you’re crushing small businesses,” Little said.
Ritter said that he opposed a move back to the 5-cent deposit, which he noted was increased to encourage recycling. However, he said the current situation has become politically untenable and puts the state at risk of a lawsuit from distributors.
“We’re getting to a point where we’re going to lose the bottle bill,” Ritter said. “If we got sued in court, I think we’d lose.”
NEW BRITAIN, CT — Stanley Black & Decker on Thursday said it has decided to close its manufacturing facility in New Britain.
Debora Raymond, vice president of external communications for the manufacturer, said the decision is a result of a “structural decline in demand for single-sided tape measures.”
The New Britain facility predominantly makes these products, according to Raymond.
“These products are quickly becoming obsolete in the markets we serve,” Raymond said, via an emailed statement Thursday.
The decision is expected to impact approximately 300 employees, according to Raymond.
“We are focused on supporting impacted employees through this transition, including providing options for employment at other facilities, severance, and job placement support services for both salaried and hourly employees,” Raymond said.
As of Thursday at 4:30 p.m., no Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act notice had been filed with the state Department of Labor.
The company’s corporate headquarters remains at 1000 Stanley Dr., New Britain.
Gov. Ned Lamont released the following statement on the decision:
“Although Stanley has made the decision to discontinue operations for manufacturing outdated products, a change in workforce opportunities is difficult for employees, their families, and any community.,” Lamont said. “However, I am hopeful that these skilled workers will be repurposed with the help of Stanley Black & Decker, a company that will still proudly be headquartered here in Connecticut. My administration is working closely with local and state leaders to support affected workers and to reimagine the factory site so it can continue to create opportunity and strengthen New Britain’s economic future.”
New Britain Mayor Bobby Sanchez said he is “deeply disappointed” the company will be closing its Myrtle Street operations.
“For generations, Stanley Works has been part of the fabric of our city, providing good-paying jobs, supporting families, and helping build New Britain’s proud reputation as the ‘Hardware City,’” Sanchez said.
According to the mayor, his office’s immediate focus is on helping affected workers and their families. The mayor has been in contact with Lamont’s office, and they will be working closely to make sure employees have access to job placement services, retraining opportunities and support, Sanchez said.
“We will continue aggressively pursuing economic development opportunities and attracting businesses that are looking for a true community partner, a city ready to collaborate, innovate and grow alongside them,” Sanchez said. “New Britain has reinvented itself before, and we will do so again.”
Stanley Black & Decker, founded in 1843, operates manufacturing facilities worldwide, according to its website. It reports having 43,500 employees globally, and makes an array of products, such as power tools and equipment, hand tools, and fasteners.
Newly released police video shows former WWE executive Vince McMahon ram his luxury sports car into the rear end of another vehicle on a Connecticut highway last summer as he was being followed by a state trooper.
McMahon, now 80, was driving his 2024 Bentley Continental GT at more than 100 mph on the Merritt Parkway when he crashed in the town of Westport, according to state police.
A trooper’s dashcam video shows McMahon accelerating away, then braking too late to avoid crashing into the back of a BMW. The Bentley then swerves into a guardrail and careens back across the highway, creating a cloud of dirt and car parts.
“Why were you driving all over 100 mph?” state police Detective Maxwell Robins asked McMahon after catching up to the wrecked Bentley, which can cost over $300,000.
“I got my granddaughter’s birthday” McMahon replied, explaining he was on his way to see her. The encounter was recorded on police bodycam video.
No one was seriously injured in the July 24 crash, which happened the same day that WWE legend Hulk Hogan died of a heart attack in Florida.
Besides damage to the rear of the BMW, another vehicle driving on the opposite side of the parkway was struck by flying debris. The driver of that third car happened to be wearing a WWE shirt, according to the police video.
McMahon was cited for reckless driving and following too closely. A state judge in October allowed McMahon to enter a pretrial probation program that will result in the charges being erased from his record next October if he successfully completes the program. He was also ordered to make a $1,000 charitable contribution.
McMahon’s lawyer, Mark Sherman, said the crash was just an accident.
“Not every car accident is a crime,” Sherman said. “Vince’s primary concern during this case was for the other drivers and is appreciative that the court saw this more of an accident than a crime that needed to be prosecuted.”
State police said Robins was trying to catch up to McMahon on the parkway and clock his speed before pulling him over. They said the incident was not a pursuit, which happens when police chase someone trying to flee officers. They also said it did not appear McMahon was trying to escape — though in the video the detective suggests otherwise.
“I’m trying to catch up to you and you keep taking off,” Robins says.
“No, no no. I’m not trying to outrun you,” McMahon says.
An accident information summary provided to the media shortly after the crash did not mention that a trooper was following McMahon.
The Associated Press obtained the videos Wednesday through a public records request. They were first obtained by The Sun newspaper.
The trooper’s bodycam video also shows him asking McMahon whether he was looking at his phone when the crash happened. McMahon said he was not and adds that he hadn’t driven his car in a long time.
After Robins tells McMahon that his car is fast, McMahon replies, “Yeah, too (expletive) fast.”
The videos also show McMahon talking to the driver he rear-ended. Barbara Doran, of New York City, told the AP last summer that McMahon expressed his concern for her and was glad she was OK. She said she was heading to a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard at the time of the crash.
After McMahon was given the traffic summons, he shook hands with Robins and another trooper and they wished him well.
McMahon stepped down as WWE’s CEO in 2022 amid a company investigation into sexual misconduct allegations. He also resigned as executive chairman of the board of directors of TKO Group Holdings, the parent company of WWE, in 2024, a day after a former WWE employee filed a sexual abuse lawsuit against him. McMahon has denied the allegations. The lawsuit remains pending.
McMahon bought what was then the World Wrestling Federation in 1982 and transformed it from a regional wrestling company into a worldwide phenomenon. Besides running the company with his wife, Linda, who is now the U.S. education secretary, he also performed at WWE events as himself.
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