The Connecticut General Assembly approved, over the weekend, H.B. 5002, an ambitious, surprisingly bold housing bill that represents a big, important step to solve our state’s affordability crisis. The legislation includes some unexpected wins on many fronts, including taking the step of eliminating most parking mandates for residential housing, enabling the conversion of commercial properties to middle housing, and strong incentives for transit-oriented development.
It is a really good bill, especially considering the many years of disappointment and failure in addressing our housing needs. Although there is much to be done (and we will surely see further reforms down the line), this legislation will increase housing supply in our state and, as a result, put downward pressure on prices.
No piece of legislation can fix our housing crisis by itself. First of all, because this is a hard problem to solve, with many complex, interlocking regulations, practices, and laws standing in the way. There is much to be written and discussed, for instance, about staircases and outdated fire regulations and how they relate to housing affordability, the size of American elevators, or indoor plumbing design. Many of these issues sound crazy in isolation (what do you mean that the size of fire trucks has an impact on housing affordability? It does), but can and should be fixed, one by one, to allow us to build safer, nicer, more affordable buildings.
Second, and no less important, addressing our housing shortage requires a change of mindset on how we think and plan our cities and towns. Legislation is important in allowing new things to happen and building incentives to change our perspective. Many of the most important fixes, however, are already available right now to our cities and towns. They only need to get out of their own way.
Consider, for instance, this one plot of land in New Haven between Church Street, Union, and Columbus Avenues, right across from Union Station. Right now, it is empty and has sat this way, fenced in and abandoned, since 2018. Before that, it was the site of woefully mismanaged public housing, so bad that the city was forced to take it over and demolish it.
This is, obviously, an incredibly valuable piece of land. It sits right by the train station, with good train service to Hartford, Boston, New York, and everywhere in between. It is a short walking distance from downtown, with all its jobs and amenities, the school of medicine, and Yale New Haven Hospital. The city has been working for years to rebuild much of this area, which was largely obliterated in the 1960s during the urban renewal demolition frenzy. This plot is one of the last pieces missing to connect the station to the city.
It has been empty, however, for seven years. City officials will come up with plenty of reasons why this has been the case (mostly involving lawyers and litigation), but the main is that New Haven has this incredibly valuable piece of land, and they have spent more than seven years just thinking about what to do with it. A similar exercise in futility took place at the former New Haven Coliseum site (still largely empty, 18 years after its demolition), English Station, and plenty of similar locations, both here and in other cities.
Quite often, cities are planning, discussing, and thinking about what they want to do with each of these plots of land. They hire consultants, hold endless community meetings, conduct dozens of zoning studies, and create elaborate documents and agreements and shiny brochures with the next cool thing they want to do. In places with especially clumsy or incompetent leaders, they come up with all kinds of “fun” buildings to attract visitors (stadiums and casinos are always inexplicably popular) and try to find ways to attract state funds to subsidize the project.
The most common result of all these plans is a maddening amount of paperwork, a developer making heroic efforts to put together financing, and… a failure. Hence, empty plots of land that sit vacant for more than a decade, as town officials work tirelessly to come up with the perfect plan for them.
The right approach, however, for most if not all of these cases, is letting it go. Any decent developer will have plenty of ideas about what to do with a five-acre parcel right by a train station. Just auction the plot of land to the highest bidder, change its zoning to “build whatever you want, as long as it is not toxic or radioactive,” and let them build. If you want something slightly more urban and creative, divide the parcel into five smaller one-acre plots and sell them to different developers under the same rules.
The most probable outcome, mainly because it is the most profitable, in-demand use for that kind of land, will be a dense, mixed-use mini neighborhood with housing, office space, some retail, and maybe a coffee shop or two. As both New Haven and Connecticut have a crippling shortage of transit-accessible housing of any kind, it will likely turn a profit and generate plenty of tax revenue for the city.
Will it be as nice as the carefully curated, endlessly debated, and community-discussed project that we will end up having there at some point? Maybe, maybe not. I tend to believe that politicians make fairly lousy planners and architects; the best parts of most cities, including New Haven, are the result of years of development slowly putting together neighborhoods, one building at a time. Despite being a lefty, I am deeply skeptical of zoning boards, city governments, and public officials coming up with good urban design.
These issues, however, are beside the point: almost any building is better than an abandoned factory, a surface parking lot, or an empty plot of land. Connecticut cities and towns need to stop overthinking, debating, and trying to come up with perfect little projects designed by the local zoning Soviet, and let people build.