Opponents of the wide-ranging housing legislation recently passed by the Democratic majorities in the General Assembly have been loud enough to induce Governor Lamont to equivocate on the bill. Will he sign it, veto it, or try to negotiate its revision?
Many of the bill’s opponents, including municipal officials, contend that its enactment would be the end of local control over development.
Arguing to the contrary, the bill’s leading advocate, House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, insists that the bill wouldn’t require any municipality to build any housing at all.
There’s much wrong with both sides of the argument and with the bill itself.
Rojas makes the bill seem like another of the meaningless poses struck by the legislature — big talk implying bold action that never comes. The bill will produce little housing and, by extending rent control to every municipality, may prevent more housing construction than it achieves.
Connecticut’s housing costs are so extreme, grinding the poor and middle class down, that action is needed urgently to build at least 100,000 multi-family units — apartments and moderately priced condominiums.
But opponents of the housing bill want to continue worshipping local control and exclusive zoning, a big cause of the shortage.
Fears of more “affordable” housing in the suburbs long have been justified. The suburbs are full of people or the children of people who fled the cities as pernicious federal and state welfare policies turned them into poverty factories. People don’t want city pathologies following them.
But even many of the gainfully employed young-adult children of suburbanites can’t find suitable housing in their hometowns or nearby. Connecticut seems to believe they should live in their parents’ basements or leave the state.
As long as building housing in Connecticut remains a matter of asking the permission of 169 municipal governments, little housing will be built. That’s the state’s recent history. While the country’s housing supply has increased 9.4% in the last decade, Connecticut’s has increased by only 3.9%. Not so coincidentally, the state’s economic growth has badly lagged the nation’s as well.
The only way to get housing built is to push the obstacles aside and build it.
Fortunately Connecticut has many opportunities to build housing without tearing up the countryside with more suburban sprawl. The state abounds with vacant industrial, office, and commercial properties in the cities and inner suburbs, properties already served by the necessary infrastructure — roads, sewers, utility lines, and schools. Recent news reports have highlighted the scores of vacant lots in Bridgeport and Hartford.
But can inexpensive housing for people of modest incomes be built without creating instant slums, as housing opponents long have feared?
Yes, but it requires a central authority to take the whole situation in hand and put the interest of the entire state first, not the interest of the people who have their housing and don’t care if others go without. It also requires giving the poor and struggling a chance for property ownership.
That is, the situation requires a state government housing construction authority to purchase unused properties and auction them to developers to pursue housing plans approved by the authority. The authority could be run by a board drawn from all parts of the state.
Of course state government often fails to demonstrate the competence and integrity to do much of anything right. Yet the city-state of Singapore somehow has found the necessary competence and integrity with housing.
In Singapore the government arranges housing construction and then finances people who want to buy their units. As a result 80% of the population lives in housing built by the government and 90% of its residents own their units. In such a scheme people gain and respect property and become middle-class. With adequate housing for all, the cost of living is reduced and prosperity grows. While multi-ethnic and multi-lingual, Singapore has social stability, little poverty and crime, great prosperity, and high educational attainment.
Couldn’t Connecticut at least experiment with this model, starting with its many decrepit factories, vacant shopping centers, and half-empty office buildings?
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)