Thomas Breen Photo
Activists Sade and Donny at an affordable housing rally.
New Haven can become a more affordable place for low-income residents to live. And the city doesn’t have to break its budget making that vision a reality.
So argues a new report with ideas for how to make that happen.
That is one of the key takeaways from the final report and list of recommendations produced by the Affordable Housing Task Force, which held its final meeting on Thursday night in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.
The task force members voted unanimously in support of adopting a final report that includes 44 specific recommendations for how to support, preserve, and develop new affordable housing in the Elm City. Click here to download a copy of the final report.
Affordable Housing Task Force members on Thursday night.
With a focus on zoning changes, improved transparency and communication, state and regional lobbying, and increased pressure on existing landlords and new developers alike, most of the recommendations seek to improve housing opportunities for the city’s neediest residents without taxing a city budget already struggling to keep up rising health care costs, pension obligations, and debt service.
“I don’t think you’ll see any budget busters in there,” City Plan Commission Chair and task force member Ed Mattison said about the report. “Everything we’ve put in should, if adopted, be relatively inexpensive and have a payoff that’s worth it.”
Wooster Square Alder and task force facilitator Aaron Greenberg went a step further. Citing recommendations for increased fines on slumlords, Greenberg said, “I think that there are some revenue-positive recommendations as well.”
That task force’s final report will now be communicated to the full Board of Alders to review, figure out which recommendations can and should be drafted into law, and then host its own series of public hearings and deliberations.
Zoning Changes: Low Hanging Fruit
City Plan Commission Chair Ed Mattison.
One of the six broad areas of recommendations covered by the report is “Increase Land Use Efficiency.” That means undoing 1960s-era “City Beautiful” zoning code regulations that promote large amounts of open space over density.
These zoning code changes, Mattison said, are some of the easiest and most readily accessible recommendations the city can act on. They involve the City Plan Commission drafting and proposing legal changes for the Board of Alders to review and potentially adopt.
“The real issue, course, at the root of the problem [of affordable housing] is money,” Mattison said. “Of which there is not a lot. The zoning changes therefore become more important because they do not require any huge amounts of money.”
The report calls for the following zoning code changes:
• Amend zoning ordinances to allow a broader definition of “family member,” including, but not limited to, increasing the number of non-related roommates permitted. Current zoning law allows for up to four non-related roommates in a dwelling unit.
• Increase the number of rentable rooms in single-family homes from one to two.
• Allow for and encourage the construction of accessory dwelling units like “mother-in-law” apartments and backyard cottages, both of which are currently forbidden by law.
• Eliminate parking requirements for new housing developments and consider imposing maximum parking caps accompanied by violation fees.
• Encourage congregate housing by amending zoning ordinances to allow cooperative living units.
• Encourage the development of “tiny” units.
• Amend zoning ordinances to allow housing where not currently allowed, such as in BE (“Wholesale and Distribution”) and BB (“Automobile Sales”) districts.
The zoning ideas came mostly from the Northwestern states, which have a housing crisis more severe than New Haven’s, Mattison said.
For example, he said, Portland, Oregon, estimates that its recent allowance of the accessory dwelling units should add roughly 600 units of housing to the city every year. If New Haven were to allow accessory dwelling units, he said, that might increase New Haven’s housing stock by around 200 each year.
“Those sorts of things, none of them are going to supply vast amounts of housing,” he said. “But 200 new housing units, that’s good, at a time when dollars are very hard to come by.”
The “Land Efficiency” section of the report also recommends that the city fund a feasibility study to determine how best to maximize the number of affordable units included in new market-rate development. That is, to figure out what kind of inclusionary zoning ordinance New Haven should adopt, if any. The report recommends that, if the city does commission a feasibility study on inclusionary zoning, then that study should be completed by the end of 2019.
Stepping Up The Pressure On State, Suburbs, And Landlords
Elm City Communities / Housing Authority of New Haven President Karen DuBois-Walton.
The report includes a suite of recommendations that call on the city to double down on the state and surrounding suburbs to pick up the slack on providing affordable housing outside of concentrated urban centers.
“The need for affordable housing affects the city of New Haven,” Elm City Communities/Housing Authority of New Haven President Karen DuBois-Walton said on Thursday night, reading from the report right before the vote, “but there are many ways in which this issue is rooted in the lack of a comprehensive regional or statewide affordable housing policy.”
By state statute, the report notes, every city and town should have a minimum of 10 percent of its housing units affordable — for which residents pay 30 percent or less of their annual income. In the 15-town South Central Connecticut region, only three municipalities meet this threshold: New Haven (32 percent), Meriden (16.1 percent), and West Haven (13.2 percent).
Similar to the proposed zoning changes, the regionally-minded recommendations focus less on looking for millions of dollars of investments from the city and more on pressuring surrounding areas to meet their legal obligations.
Some of those recommendations include:
• The city and partner organizations should take a leadership role in engaging the South Central Regional Council of Governments (SCRCOG) to study and address the disproportionate siting of affordable housing in New Haven, Meriden, and West Haven.
• The city and partner organizations should advocate for the state to allow housing authorities to create low-income housing outside of their current jurisdictions. New Haven State Rep. Roland Lemar has already introduced a bill up in Hartford that, if passed, would do just that.
• The city and partner organizations should advocate that the state legislature remove references to “community character” in the Zoning Enabling Statute (C.G.S. 8 – 2).
• The city and partner organizations should push the state to develop a Housing Affordability Impact Analysis.
The report doesn’t direct the city just to exert more pressure on the state and suburbs, but also to look more closely at bad actors closer to home.
In addition to calling for increased staff for the city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative (LCI) and Fair Rent Commission, the latter of which has only one employee, the report recommends that LCI increase fines on landlords to encourage repairs, renovations, and lead abatement.
“The City of New Haven should consider instituting procedures through in-house revision and possible legislative action to expedite the housing code compliance process,” the report reads.
Wooster Square Alder Aaron Greenberg.
“As part of this proposal, fines should be levied for non-compliance within prescribed deadlines; fines should be executed immediately, particularly for violations reported to be remedied in hours and days. Failure to pay these fines should initiate liens on property.”
After the vote, Greenberg recommended that residents concerned with following up on the affordable housing recommendations during the subsequent Board of Alders legislative process should read the report closely and figure out which recommendations fall within the domain of the alders, which fall within the domain of the city administration, and which fall within the domain of the state.
Make sure to direct your advocacy towards the relevant body of local and state government, Greenberg advised. “That will make your advocacy even more effective going forward.”
Claudette Kidd.
Some of the activists who have been most involved in the Room for All Coalition’s advocacy for affordable housing praised the task force for its hard work, specific recommendations, and transparent process.
“I feel good about all their efforts,” said Mothers and Others for Justice organizer Claudette Kidd. Now that this part of the process is over, she said, “it just means that we’ve got to go back to the drawing board” to organize around getting residents to show up to the Board of Alders hearings about which recommendations will actually become law.
She did say that she thought the final report was lacking in its recommendations for ending teen homelessness in the city.
“My main concern is about the youth,” she said, “the 17 to 24-year-old bracket.” Very little in the report had anything to say about that demographic.
Liam Brennan, a legal aid attorney and potential mayoral candidate who took a lead in drafting some of the Room for All Coalition’s affordable housing policy recommendations, lamented that the panel did not recommend the city support the establishment of the Y2Y youth homeless shelter or the passage of the Homeless Person’s Bill of Rights. He expressed enthusiasm about the panel’s recommendations for increased housing code enforcement, the expansion of housing authority jurisdiction, and its consideration of inclusionary zoning.
“I think overall they did a really good job and a really thorough job,” he said. “It’s unusual to get the public to focus on zoning and how that relates to affordable housing. But I think that was done here, and that was huge.”