When Gov. Ned Lamont returns from a trip abroad this weekend, a far-reaching housing bill will be on his desk waiting for his signature. In the meantime, key advocates are ducking opportunities to support the bill even as the reforms face significant criticism from local Republicans, land-use officials, some Democrats, and key planners for the state’s shoreline communities.
Critics are calling on the Lamont to veto the legislation before a deadline of next Tuesday. Others have floated the idea of signing the bill into law but fixing it in a special session of the legislature.
House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, one of the bill sponsors, did not respond to a number of requests for comment for this story, but in an interview after the vote in the House, Rojas told CT Examiner that “a thousand veto points” at the local level had made the development of housing “incredibly challenging and expensive.” The housing omnibus, he said, would ease the logjam by establishing statewide rules.
The bill, which combines more than 20 separate pieces of legislation, includes a wide variety of ideas including mobile showers for the homeless and the so-called “work-live-ride” provision, which would prioritize transit-oriented districts.
Opposition since the legislation passed the House and Senate has focused on three particular concerns: “Fair Share” obligations which would set additional affordable housing targets for each town; a prohibition on local authorities enforcing minimum off-street parking requirements for residential projects with fewer than 24 units; and rules that would allow developers to convert commercially-zoned properties into multifamily housing of up to nine units, as-of-right, sidestepping hearings and land-use commissions.
The provisions would significantly limit the ability of local government and residents to use land-use provisions to hinder approval of new multifamily housing.
And even many critics of the bill concede that the lack of housing in the state has reached crisis-level proportions.
Commercial properties, middle housing, parking
The housing omnibus would allow any property that is commercially zoned to be converted as-of-right into projects of between two and nine apartments — so-called middle housing. The new rules would replace often months of meetings, public hearings and discretionary decisions with a simple sign off from a local land-use official that a project complies with local zoning regulations and does not substantially impact public health or safety.
But in interviews with regional planners and local officials, CT Examiner was warned repeatedly of possible unintended consequences given the breadth of provisions included in the bill.
Margarita Alban, chair of the Greenwich planning and zoning commission, said at first she had no problem with the middle housing provision, given that her town was already approving conversions of offices into apartment housing, but Alban told CT Examiner that discussions with officials from other towns convinced her that the provision could completely change a town’s commercial center.
“You start closing businesses and building apartments and then you no longer have shops, you no longer have economic activity in your municipality because someone saw more opportunity in building housing,” Alban said. “So it’s better to see what’s best for the municipality’s economy, and how the municipality is going to thrive.”
Samuel Gold, executive director of the Lower Connecticut River Valley Council of Governments, called it “a well-intentioned but not well-thought-out provision,” warning that towns would not be prepared to implement the change as written.
Connecticut, Gold said, unlike most other states relies heavily on planning and zoning commissions instead of on paid planning staff.
“Connecticut has been very cheap over the years,” he said. “We’re based on small towns and relatively small cities that are very understaffed. We overuse the special permit special hearing process of the planning and zoning commission.”
The drawback of the current system, Gold said, was NIMBYism and arbitrary decision-making, but the flipside of the new rules was the potential for political meddling, something Gold said was relatively unusual in Connecticut.
“You can have the mayor call the staff person in the planning office and say you’re going to approve this, even if it doesn’t meet the standards,” Gold said. “Although there can be issues with land use commissions, maybe making decisions that people disagree with, at least that’s out in the open and residents and neighbors can attend those meetings, can speak out and can be part of a process.”
Francis Pickering, executive director of the Western Connecticut Council of Governments, told CT Examiner he was generally supportive of the idea of converting empty commercial buildings that would otherwise fall into disrepair into multifamily housing, but he warned that the bill used a broad brush that could be applied to any commercial property.
“It’s really expansive. It could be a beloved diner. It could be a quaint New England town center. It could be a waterfront marina,” Pickering said. “We want to have thriving main streets. We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater here.”
Pickering also warned the bill would force towns to write new zoning rules.
“By telling municipalities to move to an as-of-right process, you’re telling them to write dozens of pages of additional regulations,” Pickering said. “I think we’re probably micromanaging here by saying, here’s the process you have to use when the process is not the issue.”
Pickering said he thought the idea of changing the approval process to an as-of-right sign-off was based on a misunderstanding, an assumption that approval would be easier without a zoning process.
“That’s not necessarily true,” Pickering said. “They’re just two different tools. And if you want to be restrictive, you can use either tool to be restrictive. If you want to allow all, you can use either tool to do it.”
Eric Knapp, Old Lyme’s land use coordinator, told CT Examiner that some terms in the bill were so “undefined” as to be impossible to enforce, warning that there were “a lot of moving pieces.”
Knapp said his interpretation of the provision was that such commercial conversions would no longer need zoning commission involvement and would instead be approved like a single family home with a building permit.
“Like any single-family house, it would still need to meet setback requirements. It would still need adequate sewage disposal,” Knapp said by email. “It would still need to meet all code requirements. I would still review the application for conformance with flood zone requirements and wetlands setbacks.”
Guilford First Selectman Matt Hoey, a Democrat, said he was not in support of the legislation but said that he did not believe it would significantly affect his town.
“Our downtown area already includes mixed-use shops, stores on the first floor, apartments on the upper two or three floors. And there aren’t substantially sized buildings that would lend themselves to a conversion,” Hoey said. “I do not think it’s a good idea. It’s forcing a statewide set of zoning initiatives onto communities and it’s basically taken away local decision-making authority on housing.”
Hoey said converting the Guilford businesses around the town green into apartments was unlikely given the size of the existing buildings, and that demolishing existing buildings to build new ones, he thought, would require a special permit — but he agreed the bill was not clear on that point.
Hoey said he was concerned about other provisions in the bill, such as the elimination of minimum parking requirements and the designation of Fair Share.
“We are already burdened with a lack of parking,” Hoey said. “That’s already a challenge.”
The bill would prohibit local requirements of off-street parking for apartment complexes of fewer than 24 units, and forbid planning and zoning commissions from rejecting developments solely on the requirements of parking. For larger developments, the bill provides that 10% more parking spaces may be required than a developer’s estimated demand.
Pickering agreed that, historically, towns have required an excess of parking, but he warned that the new rules needed to take into account local conditions.
“We really live in a colonial-built environment. So many of our roads are very narrow by modern standards, many of our buildings are old and we don’t have that much surface parking,” Pickering said. “When you look at our city and town centers, they’re very dense by national standards.”
Pickering said he favored parking reform, it had to be realistic and take into account that many streets were not suited for street parking.
“Parking on streets when the road is not designed for it can cause congestion, it can lead to user conflicts, it can result in additional collisions, which can result in injuries and fatalities,” Pickering said. “The reform is a great idea, but it needs to be based on local conditions.”
Fair Share
More controversial were the so-called “Fair Share” provisions in the bill mandating the number of affordable apartments that should be built in each town. The current figures, based on a study by the consulting firm ECOnorthwest, have been criticized for their underlying methodology — but at least for now Fair Share is a state mandate without penalties for noncompliance.
On the one hand, Pickering said, the latest version of the legislation allows regions and municipalities to develop their own fair share methodology to determine how many units to build. Towns could then apply to the legislature for approval. But Pickering said the plan only allowed towns six months to complete their plans — a deadline that he called “incredibly aggressive.”
“In 18 months we could do it, but in six months it will be near impossible,” Pickering warned.
But towns failing to approve an affordable housing plan will be excluded from discretionary infrastructure funding.
Fair Share aims to allow 120,000 units of affordable housing to be built in Connecticut within 10 years, with targets of 745 units in Greenwich, 918 in Guilford 918 and 422 in Old Lyme. The goal for Bridgeport would be 6,813 units, 5,389 for Hartford and 1,140 for New Haven.
Brian O’Connor, director of public policy and advocacy for the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, said the biggest concerns for the towns he represents were Fair Share, followed by parking and commercial property conversion.
”We’re asking the governor to veto the bill,” O’Connor said.
The future of the omnibus housing bill will be decided next week. The governor can sign it or veto it, but either way the debate is expected to continue.
State Rep. Tony Scott, R-Monroe, one of the voices leading the opposition to the bill in the chamber, said that if the bill were signed as is, he expected far-reaching effects for towns.
Scott said he had asked for a meeting with the governor on the issue without success.
“Unfortunately, the Republicans have been shut out of any meetings about this bill,” Scott said.
But Scott said he did not see this as a partisan fight given that Democrats in both chambers had voted against it.
Hector Arzeno, D-Greenwich, was one of those Democrats.
“Like my two colleagues who represent Greenwich,” Arzeno said, “we know that our planning and zoning was absolutely opposed to the bill as written.”
Arzeno said he understood that beyond the language of the bill, the perception it created among the community was important.
“When you see those Fair Share numbers, and anyone who reads them, starting with me, gets a heart attack because you say it’s impossible to build,” Arzeno said. “People were very alarmed by that.”
Arzeno said he knew there were meetings underway with negotiations and that the governor had received many emails opposing the bill, so he is awaiting a decision before Tuesday’s deadline.
Desegregate CT, a nonprofit which has advocated strongly for loosening local control over the construction of housing, canceled a scheduled interview shortly before publication.
Partnership for Strong Communities, a nonprofit promoting “equitable change in Connecticut housing policy,” did not respond to an opportunity to discuss the legislation.