Paul Bass Photos
DOH-backed rehab job on Edgewood Ave.; Klein (inset).
The state’s top housing officials invited a developer to seek help building affordable housing in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood — and urged suburban officials to do their part, too.
“I hope he comes to visit our department,” state Department of Housing (DOH) Commissioner Evonne Klein said Tuesday, in reference to developer Randy Salvatore.
The city has approved Salvatore’s three-phase plan to build up to 140 apartments, 7,000 square feet of stores, 120,000 square feet of research space, and 50,000 square feet of offices on 11.6 fallow acres on the blocks between Congress Avenue and Church Street South closest to downtown. To win approval, Salvatore agreed to include 30 percent “affordable” housing in the mix. City officials said they plan to seek government help from agencies like the state housing department and the quasi-public Connecticut Housing Finance Authority (CHFA) for Salvatore to build those affordable apartments.
“This is why the department is here. I hope we see an application from him,” said Klein, who also oversees CHFA’s board.
Klein made the remark during an appearance on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
The commissioner — who has run the department since 2013, when Gov. Dannel P. Malloy created it to centralize the state’s affordable-housing efforts — also spoke about her efforts to convince suburbs to build their share of lower-income housing.
This month Klein wrote a letter to all the state’s mayors and first selectmen urging them to help the state eliminate all chronic homelessness by the end of the year (through the Zero: 2016 campaign. This past Friday Klein announced that the campaign has found permanent housing for 981 people in the state, include 77 people since just this October from Greater New Haven.
With a link to her department’s programs, the letter urges the mayors and first selectmen to “build affordable housing in your community as a step towards preventing homelessness.”
Klein knows about doing that firsthand. She used to serve as first selectwoman of Darien, in Fairfield County. She oversaw the successful passage there of an affordable housing plan for the town. It included an “inclusionary zoning” plan that requires developers to build one unit of affordable housing for every five units of market-rate housing, or else contribute to a fund for the town to do it.
In the WNHH interview, Klein said 28 of the state’s 169 cities and towns have adopted such inclusionary zoning plans. Her goal now is to get more of them to do so, she said. Based on her experience in Darien, she recommends towns not allow for developers to pay into the separate fund, which takes longer, or to build the affordable units off-site.
While a “vocal minority” often opposes affordable housing plans in wealthier towns, “a majority understands the need,” Klein observed. “If you want to have a vibrant community,” seniors and young people have to be able to afford to live there. Young people in particular are leaving the state, in part because of high housing costs.
DOH invests $170 million a year in affordable housing in Connecticut through low-interest, sometimes forgivable, loans. With CHFA it has helped provide $1 billion in tax credits and other financial support for projects, according to Klein.
She was asked about the fungible definition of “affordable” across different state and federal housing subsidy programs. Four-member households earning as high as 120 percent of New Haven’s $87,000 annual area median income can qualify for the state’s programs. But Klein said the state works to make sure people at all levels are included, including the “low-low-income,” by including requirements for inclusion of households at, say, the 30 and 60 percent levels. The trick is to balance the economic needs of a project — the revenue stream needed for a developer to pay the bills — with the quest for true diversity.
“It’s important to have mixed-income developments” that include “low-low-income” households, Klein said.
It also does make sense to include households with $80,000 to $90,000 annual incomes in the “affordable” mix, she said, as a way of ensuring that gentrification doesn’t price working and middle-class people out of communities.
Contrary to how it seems, families earning in that $80,000 range do sometimes need help affording decent housing, Klein argued. Sometimes they find themselves facing choices “about whether to buy health insurance for your whole family.”
Click on or download the above sound file to hear the full interview with Klein about her work at the state Department of Housing.