Housing Call: Upzone Cities & Suburbs

Should Connecticut prioritize constructing affordable housing in economic hubs like New Haven, or exclusive towns like New Haven’s surrounding suburbs?

Two housing construction advocates offered different answers to that question at a panel organized by the Housing Authority of New Haven/Elm City Communities on Thursday night.

The panel, focused on the state’s need for more housing and how zoning reform can achieve that goal, comprised Mike Kingsella, CEO of the national housing advocacy organization Up For Growth, and Erin Boggs, executive director of the Connecticut non-profit Open Communities Alliance. 

The discussion was one of the local public housing provider’s Breaking Ground panels at the Q House community center at 197 Dixwell Ave., a series of public conversations about housing policy aiming to inform residents, advocates, and lawmakers alike about solutions to the affordable housing shortage squeezing New Haven and Connecticut as a whole. Click here to read a previous Independent article about the first conversation in that series, all about why New Haven rents are so high.

Both Boggs and Kingsella outlined how Connecticut, like most states in the country, hasn’t been producing enough housing to keep pace with its growing population. 

“Low income folks are bearing the brunt of that,” said Kingsella. Connecticut is short 140,000 affordable homes, he said, severely narrowing the options for families who can’t afford market-rate housing.

This scarcity of housing has driven up rent to the point that, as Boggs presented, 220,695 Connecticut households are allocating more than 50 percent of their income toward housing.

Both advocates pointed to zoning laws — especially regulations that restrict housing density to single-family homes — as a culprit. Zoning codes first emerged in the U.S. in the early 20th century as a tactic to explicitly maintain racial segregation. When direct racial prohibitions became illegal, Boggs and Kingsella noted, city planners began to limit the development of higher-density or more affordable housing in historically white areas.

Over the course of their conversation, the two housing experts posed alternate, though overlapping, visions of how the state should prioritize funding and facilitating affordable housing development.

They illustrated those visions in separate color-coded maps that, in turn, showed New Haven as either an ideal location for more housing or one of the places that needs to build more housing the least.

Kingsella’s map, created using Up For Growth’s ​“A Better Foundation” framework, identifies areas that are ideal for increased density using three criteria: those areas have high economic mobility, have at least two jobs per housing unit based on Census data, and are either highly walkable or close to transit infrastructure.

Those criteria mean that New Haven is better poised to support higher density compared to the surrounding suburbs, according to Up For Growth. Kingsella’s map depicts much of New Haven and Bridgeport — along with one census tract in Milford — as more conducive to housing growth than most of the surrounding area.

Boggs, meanwhile, presented a proposal for housing development across the state that would require towns with the most restrictive and exclusionary zoning practices — the towns that have historically prevented the most development — to bear the brunt of constructing enough housing to meet the region’s need.

Open Communities Alliance has been advocating for such a system as part of a coalition of housing organizations in the state known as Growing Together CT. The coalition has continually proposed a Fair Share bill that would require towns to meet individual affordable housing development goals based on both their capacity and historic restrictiveness.

The proposed Fair Share bill could lead to the construction of 300,000 housing units in Connecticut, Boggs estimated.

Open Communities Alliance calculated that New Haven has an obligation to construct 0 new affordable housing units. A suburb like Guilford, meanwhile, has a responsibility to build between 1,500 and 3,500 units of housing, according to Open Communities Alliance.

“There should be affordable housing everywhere,” Boggs said, ​“and there should be choice”: low-income families shouldn’t be forced to live in urban areas if they don’t want to.

Last year, Open Communities Alliance launched a lawsuit against the town of Woodbridge, arguing that the town’s restrictions against houses with more than two residential units violate the Connecticut Zoning Enabling Act, the Connecticut Fair Housing Act, and the state constitution. The lawsuit is ongoing.

Meanwhile, in nearby New Jersey, a state supreme court ruling known as the Mount Laurel Doctrine has effectively required every municipality in the state to contribute to affordable housing development since 1983. The policy has led to the development of over 170,000 housing units in New Jersey, according to Boggs — 70,000 of which were deed-restricted below-market-rate units.

The two maps offered different roadmaps to the development of more affordable housing across the state — but Kingsella and Boggs noted that they aren’t mutually exclusive.

As the panelists wrapped up their presentations, audience member and Elm City Communities marketing intern Nasir Anderson asked them which housing policies they think the state should prioritize the most.

Aside from the Fair Share law, Boggs said, the state could implement a series of reforms to Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers — such as adding utility allowances, adjusting the value of each voucher to reflect market rents, and (as Kingsella would later suggest) making them a universal entitlement. And, she added, the state could expand the jurisdiction of housing authorities to allow them to build in other municipalities. 

“Wages aren’t living wages,” added Kingsella — and the state should be tackling that issue as well, alongside zoning reforms and increased funding for housing development.

Karen DuBois-Walton, the executive director of Elm City Communities / Housing Authority, argued that in the meantime, as landlords amass more and more market power given the shortage of housing, lawmakers should work to strengthen tenant protections.

“There’s so much that we can do,” said moderator Will Viederman. ​“We have essentially no excuse for inaction.”