The Connecticut State legislature has called a special two-day session this week, with the House meeting on Wednesday and the Senate meeting Thursday. A critical agenda item is to pass a new version of the Housing legislation (HB5002) that Governor Lamont vetoed in June.
Unlike the regular legislative process, there will be no public hearings or comment on the proposed bill.
One core concept carried forward from the vetoed bill, is that each Connecticut town must build its “Fair Share” of affordable housing. In the previous bill, the legislators had to vote on the numbers required from each town. The new bill passes the buck to unidentified bureaucrats to assign quotas to the Regional Councils of Governments, who, in turn, will assign quotas to each town in their region during 2028 and 2029. The legislators must assume that by 2029 voters will not remember who was responsible for the mass transformation of their towns.
Last week, I was elected Chairman of Lyme’s Affordable Housing Commission. Lyme has been working on practical solutions to increase affordable housing, including tax credits to landlords and homeowners with accessory dwelling units that rent to people qualifying for affordable housing under the state’s guidelines, and a program to fund rehabilitation of existing affordable homes (based on a similar program implemented in Stonington). These are concrete steps towards addressing identifiable needs.
The proposed legislation anticipates the suburbanization of rural Connecticut and will burden towns with unfunded mandates to build affordable housing. Based on analysis conducted for Lyme, I estimate is that each affordable housing unit will cost between $400,000 and $500,000. Applying the “Fair Share” of affordable units from the vetoed bill to our local towns, we can get a preview of the impacts:
| Town | Existing Units | Fair Share | Additional Units | Estimated Cost | Cost per |
| (Millions) | Household | ||||
| Chester | 1,679 | 243 | 14.5% | 109 | 65,128 |
| Clinton | 6,389 | 457 | 7.2% | 206 | 32,188 |
| Deep River | 2,169 | 231 | 10.7% | 104 | 47,925 |
| East Lyme | 8,936 | 525 | 5.9% | 236 | 26,438 |
| Essex | 3,328 | 327 | 9.8% | 147 | 44,216 |
| Haddam | 3,524 | 369 | 10.5% | 166 | 47,120 |
| Lyme | 1,145 | 234 | 20.4% | 105 | 91,965 |
| New London | 12,514 | 260 | 2.1% | 117 | 9,350 |
| North Stonington | 2,272 | 242 | 10.7% | 109 | 47,931 |
| Old Lyme | 4,557 | 452 | 9.9% | 203 | 44,635 |
| Old Saybrook | 5,983 | 509 | 8.5% | 229 | 38,283 |
| Stonington | 9,615 | 537 | 5.6% | 242 | 25,133 |
| Waterford | 8,929 | 586 | 6.6% | 264 | 29,533 |
| Westbrook | 4,180 | 288 | 6.9% | 130 | 31,005 |
Imagine how your town would be transformed with this number of new housing units. Among other things, this proposed legislation would seem to be the end of rural communities in Connecticut.
Additionally, the proposed bill anticipates the creation of “priority housing development zones,” permitting as of right multifamily housing, with minimum density of four single family units, six duplex or townhouse units or ten multifamily units per acre.
As a part of establishing goals, we should fully understand the scope of the problem, including both the supply of and demand for affordable housing. However, the legislature only measures housing with deed restricted rent limitations, ignoring all existing market rate low-cost housing alternatives. To make matters worse, the proposed legislation raises the requirement for deed restriction from 10 years to 40, making it vastly more difficult to incentivize investment in affordable housing.
There is no doubt that housing is unaffordable for many in Connecticut, as it is across America. We should take sensible steps to enact policies that alleviate this problem. But we should do this without creating other unintended consequences, such as unsustainably raising real estate taxes, which defeat the intended purpose of affordability.
Rural parts of Connecticut have large numbers of residents that are ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed). According to The United Way, this segment represents 40% of the residents of Chester, 41% in Westbrook, 37% in Deep River, 31% in East Lyme, 29% in East Haddam and 20% and 19% in the “rich” towns of Old Lyme and Lyme. Property tax increases would put severe stress on our already challenged citizens.
The citizens of Connecticut have voted overwhelmingly for the current Legislature. The Governor and Legislature have determined to pass this proposed legislation in this week’s Special Session, without public hearings or sufficient time for thoughtful amendments to ensure that the goal of affordable housing is attained with workable solutions. This situation has me recalling the H.L. Menkin quote, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”