STAMFORD – The people gathered in the community room at police headquarters on a chilly Thursday evening were looking for responses to a string of questions that boil down to one.
What is the state trying to do to my neighborhood?
The meeting was called by the Stamford Neighborhoods Coalition, which has been tracking bills in the state legislature that, members say, seek to fill Connecticut’s housing need by setting state mandates over municipal zoning regulations.
“In the last dozen years, legislation coming from the state has been undermining local zoning control,” said Barry Michelson, a coalition member who organized the community meeting. “They get in something one year, a little more the next year, until things that we cherish – like open space and responsible development supported by adequate infrastructure – have all taken a back seat to building affordable housing.”
Creating affordable housing “is extremely important,” said Michelson, an urban planner. “But it must be done with local input.”
He invited a slate of Stamford-area elected leaders, community activists, and a regional planner to speak with residents about zoning-related bills that are still alive with less than three weeks to go in the legislative session.
The list includes Senate Bill 207, which would allow one municipality’s housing authority to build in another municipality without its permission.
House Bill 5473 would set up a fund for municipalities to install sewer lines in non-sewered areas to allow for construction of multi-family housing.
House Bill 5475 would limit wetlands reviews, public hearings and other land-use procedures in consideration of development proposals, and would allow conversion of nursing homes to residential units as of right.
House Bill 5390 would give a state monitor power to decide development proposals in neighborhoods situated near train stations and other transit hubs.
House Bill 5174 would allow churches to create up to eight homeless shelter units without consideration of bathroom or kitchen facilities.
Senate Bill 416 would permit conversion of commercial and industrial lots to residential use without public hearings or reviews, including environmental effects of past uses.
Slow, until it gets fast
“We want developers to do a good job. We want development in our towns and cities,” said State Sen. Ryan Fazio, a Republican representing Greenwich and part of Stamford and New Canaan. “The balance of power has shifted to Hartford, but we need the local citizenry in the driver’s seat.”
About 600 bills came out of the legislature this session, which ends May 8. So it’s crunch time, Fazio said.
“Everything that goes on at the capitol is complex and slow-moving until it goes fast at the end,” he told the group. “The bills that came out of committee will be much different from the ones that come out of the legislature at the last minute. They are so complicated that you don’t know what’s in them this hour versus the next hour.”
Constituents “are immensely affected by things that don’t get a full debate,” Fazio said.
That’s happening, said Kathy Kligler, a Springdale resident who attended the meeting, in part, to learn more about a possible project to convert the Riverbend office park off Hope Street into an apartment complex of up to 470 units.
“Who wants all those units on Hope Street? It’s completely backed up,” Kligler said of the narrow road jammed with multi-family housing and businesses. “What’s going on here?”
A woman at the back of the room said no one in Hartford, or Stamford for that matter, is looking at the repercussions of all the recent development – more than 12,000 housing units in a dozen years.
“Stamford Hospital can’t handle all the patients,” the woman said. “My son was having heart problems and the hospital told him to go home and call his doctor because the wait was so long. Nobody (in government) wants to hear this. They just want to keep building.”
Emergency-room waits can be five hours or more, city Rep. Kindrea Walston said. Waits are long, too, for an appointment with a physician, she said.
“It’s a month and a half, two months, to see a doctor,” Walston said.
There are quality-of-life failures, city Rep. Bonnie Kim Campbell said.
“I represent an area that historically has been denied and disenfranchised, but now, because people with big resumes are running out of land, they’re coming back to build monstrosities that no one can afford to live in,” Campbell said. “I can no longer see the sky from my window. You can’t see the sky anymore going down Tresser Boulevard. Stamford seniors can’t stay in Stamford; young people can’t afford it, either. We are not embracing our values.”
‘A different outcome for Stamford than for, say, Darien‘
Current housing policies are poorly conceived, residents said.
“We’re building higher-density housing to make it cheaper for developers,” said Maria Weingarten of CT169Strong, a grassroots group that advocates for local zoning control in Connecticut’s 169 municipalities. “We’re not talking about all the infrastructure the community needs.”
A woman sitting in the front row said it’s hard to make sense of what legislative leaders in Hartford are doing.
“Pressure is coming from the state to decrease local control, but there’s a different outcome for Stamford than for, say, Darien,” the woman said. “In Darien there’s pressure to build to help with the responsibility of creating affordable units. In Stamford they took the land that was affordable and built high-rent luxury buildings. What’s driving all this?”
Residents said state leaders are taking a one-size-fits-all zoning approach espoused by affordable housing advocates who think that, to fill demand, you have to build more. But development in Stamford is attracting out-of-towners with large salaries, driving up rents citywide and driving out local people who need housing, residents said.
Erin Boggs, executive director of Open Communities Alliance, which supports affordable housing through land-use reforms, said the group “is not trying to end local control of zoning, in fact our major zoning proposal … ensures that municipalities have the power to plan and zone in accordance with existing law.”
Open Communities Alliance “wants towns to take their responsibilities concerning zoning under state law seriously,” Boggs said. That means “providing housing for a variety of income levels, which is something the majority of communities do not currently do.”
Asked why the supply and demand concept isn’t working – adding thousands of new units has driven rents up, not down –
Boggs said, “It is not housing abundance that raises the price of units, it’s scarcity. If prices are high, it shows demand is high. If anything, Stamford should be demanding that its neighbors start contributing more to alleviating the state’s and region’s housing crunch. It cannot only be up to the cities.”
Francis Pickering, executive director of the Western Connecticut Council of Governments, said he is involved in some of the conversations with Gov. Ned Lamont and State Rep. Jason Rojas of East Hartford, the House majority leader who spearheads the push for affordable housing.
“Rojas is a good guy. Lamont supports local zoning control. But bills appear and amendments happen and there are no fingerprints on them. Where are they coming from?” Pickering said. “It’s a dysfunctional system that is resulting in bad outcomes.”
Campbell said “the people with the juice in Hartford,” members of her own Democratic Party, “are not listening.” Weingarten said government leaders are clearing the way for developers to build high-density projects to create tax revenue, not housing that works for people.
Fazio, a Republican, said Connecticut needs rounded housing policies.
“It’s not just about chasing the almighty dollar. We need quality of life. We need community,” Fazio said. “We don’t want to create cookie-cutter neighborhoods just to go from 3 percent growth to 6 percent growth.”
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Editor’s note: This story has edited to correct the brief gloss on House Bill 5473, and clarify comments by Maria Weingarten