Sometimes struggling communities have to take drastic measures. Take, for instance, this town in southern Connecticut that has fallen on hard times. Last year, faced with blighted properties, ruined structures, and crumbling, decadent buildings, the town demolished 87 housing units as it tried to stay ahead. Authorities could not keep up with the tide of despair taking over the town and could only get 70 units built for its desperate residents. A familiar tragedy: a town falls behind, population shrinks, desperate measures.
Or… maybe not. The town in southern Connecticut did this was Greenwich, by some measures one of the most prosperous, affluent municipalities in the country.
Greenwich is not just incredibly expensive — something that fully reflects the huge demand from people wanting to live in town — but it is also served by four commuter rail stations with direct service to Midtown Manhattan. Maybe the fact that one of those stations sits adjacent to a golf course gives a strong hint about how willing they have been to consider new housing.
These figures come from a fascinating dataset released last week by the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development that provides a fascinating overview of our housing woes. Our state built, last year, a grand total of 6,840 units. The vast majority were concentrated in a few cities and towns: New Haven, Bridgeport, Hartford, Norwalk, and Farmington lead the pack. On their own, they are responsible for almost a full third of the housing units built in our state last year. Just ten communities are responsible for almost half of new construction.
A staggering number of towns in our state barely built any housing whatsoever. Taking a three-year average to account for large development projects, Greenwich barely built 91 units a year (and knocked down 69), Darien 57, Bristol 42, and Avon 33. Every single one of these towns is wealthy, has really expensive real estate (meaning, people want to live there), and yet has been trying as hard as it can not to build anything. No matter how hard a few core towns work with new development, the fact that many of our nicest, wealthiest towns just refuse to expand their housing stock has become a huge problem for the state.
This complete, abject refusal to build anything is relatively new. From 1990 to 2007, Connecticut built, on average, 9,428 new housing units a year. The Great Recession crashed the real estate market and drove housing starts to unprecedented lows; in 2011, only 3,173 new houses were built in our state.
The problem is that our construction rate never recovered. From 2014 to 2024, we averaged 5,894 units a year. After a short post-pandemic blip, we built fewer houses in 2024 than in 2023. As a result, we have been around 4,000 units a year behind in new housing construction. No wonder prices keep going up.
Why this is happening is far from a mystery. We can look at Hartford, one of the big builders in recent years. The city passed a series of ambitious reforms to its overly restrictive zoning code over the years, eliminating parking minimums first, followed by a new, updated form-based code. The city went from building dozens of units in a good year to 468 last year—and development is not slowing down. Norwalk, New Haven, and Stamford have welcomed new development instead of erecting bureaucratic roadblocks and restrictive zoning rules all over the place.
New developments have been good for these cities. New Haven, for example, now has a lower mill rate than some of its suburbs that have refused to accommodate new housing. Hamden averaged 26 units a year for the past three years; West Haven, 19. Both saw their grand lists slowly fall behind due to aging housing stock and lack of growth, while New Haven became both wealthier and more affordable. Stamford has essentially grown itself out of a poverty trap—something that Bridgeport now seems to realize it can do as well.
Trouble is, this is a state of 169 towns. If we only have half a dozen adding new units at a decent pace, we will never be able to close the gap. Housing prices will continue to climb, middle-class families will continue to move out of the state as we price them out, and economic growth will continue to falter, as businesses will continue to struggle to find workers to expand.
We need our cities to continue growing (especially Hartford, which has massive amounts of vacant land and surface parking lots that can be turned into housing), but this is not enough. Until we have every town in our state working together to fix this problem and actually building new housing, we won’t be able to fix this problem.
Figure 1: New Housing Construction, per year