Housing Commission Divided On ​“Inclusion”

A new report from the city’s Affordable Housing Commission has surfaced a divide among its members: Will ​“inclusionary zoning” do more to help, or hurt, local low-income renters?

That intra-commission debate is detailed in a new 29-page report that the Affordable Housing Commission submitted to the Board of Alders as a communication as part of Monday night’s local legislative meeting agenda.

The document — dubbed the New Haven Affordable Housing Commission Report and Recommendations October 2021 — represents the first formal publication to come from a city commission that the Board of Alders first created two years ago, and that held its first meeting in April of this year.

It includes a host of policy recommendations for the alders to consider, all with the goal of adding new and maintaining existing affordable places to live in town. Some of those recommendations include creating a citywide rental registry of below market rental (BMR) apartments, dedicating federal pandemic-era relief funds to boosting the city’s down payment assistance program, and petitioning the state to step up its funding of legal services that help those facing eviction and foreclosure.

Click here to read the full report.

While most of the report’s policy recommendations have received the unified support of the full commission, a two-and-a-half-page section in the middle of the document reveals a division among these local affordable housing experts around ​“inclusionary zoning.”

That’s the Elicker Administration’s proposal to require developers to set aside affordable units in new and rehabbed apartment complexes citywide, with a focus downtown and on publicly-owned land.

The proposal has already received hours of public debate at a City Plan Commission meeting in July and a Board of Alders Legislation Committee meeting earlier this morning. (Read an extensive reader debate about that here.) The City Plan Commission wound up unanimously endorsing the proposal, while the Legislation Committee kept the debate open for at least one more meeting before issuing its own recommendations. The full Board of Alders will have the final say over whether or not to adopt the proposed zoning code change.

The newly published Affordable Housing Commission report offers yet another window into how New Haveners — even those tapped by the city to serve as official public experts on how to promote affordable housing in town — remain divided on the potential impacts and efficacy of the zoning change.

“The Affordable Housing Commission has not come to a consensus on the city’s efforts to pass an IZ ordinance and is vocal about their various opinions,” reads the report.

Commissioners’ various testimonies at the previous City Plan Commission and Legislation Committee meetings also mark out where some of these individual commissioners stand in the ongoing local debate around IZ.

Click here , here and here for previous stories detailing how the IZ proposal would work and the public debate around the proposal. And click here, here, here, here, here, here, and here to read the inclusionary zoning ordinance documents submitted to the Board of Alders.

Not Enough; Still Segregated; Too ​“Restrictive”

The Affordable Housing Commission report offers a handful of reasons why some of its commissioners oppose the Elicker Administration’s IZ proposal as it currently exists.

Those arguments include that the current IZ proposal:

• Fails to ​“offer a substantial number of affordable units needed”;

• ​“Perpetuates the City’s history of segregation and redlining by its attempt to incorporate overlaying zoning reforms”; and

• ​“Creates a restrictive development market that awards large developers with ​‘big’ incentives.”

The report references studies in California and North Carolina that found that inclusionary zoning laws resulted in higher prices and lower square-footages for single-family homes.

“Most importantly,” the report continues, ​“developers have historically expressed strong criticism of mandatory IZ programs due to IZ’s building policies in jurisdictions that require developers to sell or rent a portion of the units at below-market levels, thus reducing or cutting into their profits. To compensate for their loss, developers shift their loss of revenue to market-rate rentals and sales.”

In response to those concerns raised by developers and other IZ critics, the report states, New Haven’s proposal offers incentives such as ​“density bonuses and eliminates parking requirements to offset developers’ cost burdens and losses.”

Individual Affordable Housing Commissioners like Anika Singh Lemar and Karen DuBois-Walton have raised some of the concerns outlined above in various public meetings on IZ in recent months.

During July’s City Plan Commission meeting, Lemar, a Yale Law School professor, argued that one of the best ways to decrease rents and increase affordability citywide is to promote the creation of all kinds of housing, including market-rate units. ​“I don’t care about the drying up of investment because I care about developer profits,” Lemar said at that meeting. ​“I care about killing new development because I care about housing affordability. … New market rate housing is good for affordability.”

During the Nov. 9 Legislation Committee meeting, DuBois-Walton — who helms the city’s public housing authority — took on a different critique of the IZ proposal. She argued that the Elicker Administration’s proposal doesn’t go far enough in helping the lowest-income New Haveners who are most in need of affordable places to live.

She argued that the city should increase the mandated affordable set-asides from between 5 and 15 percent of a new apartment building to 30 percent of units in mixed income developments. She also argued that the city should require lease-up preferences for families making between 0 and 30 percent of the area median income (AMI) for those units required to be rented out to tenants with federal Section 8 Housing Code Vouchers (HCV). ​“The last thing we want to do is contribute to ongoing segregation,” she said during that meeting. ​“The last thing we want to do is make decisions today” that will make New Haven’s housing market even less affordable and more unequal 10 years down the road.

And in both spoken and written testimony submitted to the Legislation Committee this month, Affordable Housing Commissioner Elias Estabrook urged the alders to take another look at the city’s proposed IZ map out of a concern that the policy will encourage gentrification.

“I think the City’s inclusionary zoning policy should prioritize the construction of mixed-income developments in Downtown, Wooster Square, Long Wharf, and Westville village,” he wrote to the Legislation Committee. ​“Dixwell, Dwight, the Hill, Newhallville, and Fair Haven are not affluent areas ​‘of opportunity’ and they already provide some affordable housing options for communities of color.”

He said he’s concerned that rising rents in lower-income neighborhoods adjacent to Downtown could lead to gentrification and displacement. ​“To me, the negative impacts to communities of color and low-income households of a market-rate boom in these neighborhoods outweighs the potentially positive, long-term impact of the boom contributing more units to the housing supply in the Greater New Haven region. For these neighborhoods, I think the City should design a Tier of this Inclusionary Zoning policy to require at least 30%-60% of units be affordable to residents with incomes between 30% and 80% of AMI.

“The City should provide a menu of different combinations of units and income limits. Setting the policy this way would prevent predominantly market-rate developments from driving displacement in these neighborhoods, and it would mean that City would need to seek out nonprofit and private affordable housing developers as well as collaborate with LCI and its Housing Authority (Elm City Communities) to develop new housing that is primarily affordable.”

Affordable Units & Multifamily Developments

The newly completed Affordable Housing Commission report also offers the arguments of commissioners in support of the city’s IZ proposal.

Those commissioners ​“acknowledge the marginalizing impact of redlining, segregated zoning, and the limited production of affordable housing,” the report reads.

“However, they further reason that IZ, if approved by the Board of Alders with an increased mandatory affordable housing component of 15%-20% serves as a starting point for the city’s effort to increase affordable rentals. Proponents affirm that effective management, standard and transparent tax abatements, the creation of in-lieu fees guaranteed to fund the development and rehabilitation of affordable units, and the tracking of displacement and stringency indexes can increase affordable units and multifamily developments in New Haven.”

The report references IZ researchers and advocates in San Francisco, Washington D.C., and suburban Boston who describe IZ as ​“an affordable housing tool that links the production of affordable housing to the production of market-rate housing. According to supporters, without IZ, many cities would not offer affordable housing in key locations such as town centers and Downtown corridors.”

Those researchers and supporters also note that IZ ​“can fast-track housing productions and permit requirements, unlike conventional zoning regulations. Supporters also reason that IZ is more fiscally sustainable because it requires fewer direct public subsidies than traditional affordable housing initiatives.”

During the recent Legislation Committee meeting, Affordable Housing Commissioners Jaime Myers-McPhail and Rebecca Corbett offered similar arguments in support of adopting IZ in New Haven — even as they advocated for requirements that developers set aside even more units at even deeper levels of affordability.

“We have a crisis of segregation in our city that is unjust and costs lives,” Myers-McPhail said. ​“Inclusionary zoning is one tool that our city could implement to ensure that more residents have access to safe, affordable housing.”

Corbett agreed. She argued that downtown’s boom in luxury and market-rate developments is turning that part of the city into an exclusive redoubt for the wealthy. ​“Downtown can’t become a gated community,” she said. ​“The wealthy developers have already made clear that they’re not going to make” space for lower- and middle-income renters. Inclusionary zoning could force some of those developments to open up, she said.

And at July’s City Plan Commission meeting, fellow Affordable Housing Commissioner Claudette Kidd. Kidd, who was formerly homeless and now lives in the Hill, spoke then about how difficult it remains ​“to pay rent, pay bills, buy food, take care of my daughter, take care of myself. … My concern is that I see all of these properties going up and zero available for affordable units.” Inclusionary zoning should help make some of those developments affordable to people currently priced out.

Recommendations: Incentives; Research; Affordability

The Affordable Housing Commission report ends by making a few recommendations to the Board of Alders on how best to move forward with IZ, even with the commission’s lack of consensus.

Those recommendations include:

• The Board of Alders should ​“require the City to quantify the dollar amount of incentives awarded to developers to understand the monetary benefits of IZ and its financial impact on New Haven taxpayers and residents”;

• The city should ​“research the disparate impact of Inclusionary Zoning based on race and socio-economic standards”;

• The city should ​“require all IZ developments to list their affordable housing availabilities on the [below market rental] registry when it is created;

• Alders should ​“increase affordability requirements to either 15% or 20%”;

• The city should ​“increase the area/zone where affordable units are required to include Science Park”; and

• The Board of Alders should ​“advocate for the most progressive AMI% (the current proposal of 50% is superior to most other cities with IZ. But still isn’t affordable to anyone below New Haven’s median income.”