After weeks of dithering and doubts, Governor Lamont finally decided to veto H.B. 5002, the landmark housing bill approved by the General Assembly following months of debate.
I have been writing about this piece of legislation often over the past few months. Although this bill is far from perfect, it was by far the best policy proposal to come out of the legislature in decades to address the most important issue facing our state.
So many of the state’s problems can be traced directly to housing. Low employment growth? A direct result of a stagnant population, itself a result of not building housing. Low social mobility? Closely related to our residential racial and economic segregation. Congested roads? Lack of housing close to workplaces and transportation hubs. High cost of living? Mostly driven by high rents and housing costs. School funding woes? Housing segregation drives most of the disparities.
Fixing housing, making it more affordable, will not, on its own, fully fix employment growth, social mobility, congestion, school funding, or the high cost of living in our state. What is increasingly clear, however, is that we cannot fix any of these problems without addressing housing first. And yet, our state has essentially refused to even consider solutions until this year—only to again fall back into inaction.
Those who opposed H.B. 5002, or any other housing reform for that matter, like to argue that this is a really hard problem to fix. We need to account for all kinds of factors, you see, from wetlands to traffic to infrastructure to the impact on existing residents to the racial impact on air quality to town vibes and general aesthetics. Every proposal is met with endless rounds of nitpicking and scrutiny, ranging from well-intentioned questions to obvious, bad-faith concern trolling.
As a result, housing bills that start with clear, straightforward premises always end up being lathered in caveats, asterisks, special provisions, and exemptions. By the end of the session, the critics complain that the whole thing is confusing and hard to figure out—and please, just let towns keep working toward not fixing the problem the same way they’ve been not doing anything for the past two decades.
I am all for policy nuance, and I’ve spent enough time around the process to understand that getting the details right is important. But for housing, a lot of this nuance is nonsense. This is an issue that has one core solution that has to be at the center of any reform, and everything else is just decoration:
Build. More. Housing.
That’s it. How do you make housing affordable? You build more of it. Everywhere. Of all kinds. The more, the better. You build nice tall buildings full of apartments. You build small triple-deckers, row houses, and even (gasp) single-family homes. You build luxurious, high-class condos with fancy amenities and smaller one- and two-bed apartments. You let developers build a lot of housing. You have housing authorities build a lot of housing. You build more housing. That’s it.
Sure, you can then get to some policy nuance. Building housing on a floodplain is probably a bad idea. We shouldn’t allow that. Having a big complex without sewer lines is probably premature. We should build those first. We should lean into building housing close to where people work and near mass transit.
But really, the goal is more housing. Any bill we pass should answer the question of how we build more housing first and then sort out any details later—making sure that none of the tweaks or requirements get in the way of building more housing.
Note, by the way, that I am not adding “affordable” anywhere in front of “housing,” because that tends to be one of those nuanced distractions that both derail the first priority (more housing) and don’t really fix costs.
The easiest, best way to make your existing stock of expensive, luxury apartments more affordable is to also build luxurious but newer apartments across the street. And the best way to ensure that beautiful, charming, historic neighborhoods do not get gentrified by yuppie hordes moving from New York City is to have many of those new luxury towers built elsewhere to keep them at bay.
For all its complexity, H.B. 5002 was a fairly remarkable bill that truly would have achieved this simple goal of building more housing, despite some compromises. Eliminating parking minimums allowed developers to build more housing units at lower cost in the same space. As Connecticut currently has a housing shortage and not a car storage problem (seriously, we have way too many parking lots), this was a good idea. Allowing commercial areas to have housing was a good way to get more units built in places that already had the infrastructure. Providing incentives to build more housing near transit did the same.
Was it enough? No, because we need to build more housing than that. But it moved the needle in the right direction.
In the coming months, we are going to have a long, contentious debate about these issues. We are going to hear many voices with all kinds of worries and concerns about what the right approach is, the role of local democracy, and (sigh) town character. The one thing to focus on, and the way to tell whether someone is serious about fixing this issue or just posturing and stalling, is whether their proposals will get more housing built.