Housing Panel Targets Zoning, Suburbs

Pass an inclusionary zoning ordinance. Let the housing authority build outside of New Haven. Set up a public database of affordable housing resources. And create a new affordable housing commission to stay on top of local, state, and federal policy changes.

Those are just a handful of the dozens of recommendations the city’s Affordable Housing Task Force plans to send to the Board of Alders regarding how to legislatively address the city’s affordable housing crisis.

During a 45-minute hearing in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall on Wednesday night, the task force’s eight members read through a draft report of policy recommendations they plan to vote on at a follow up meeting on Jan. 24.

Broken into six general areas of priority, the recommendations spanned adjustments to city zoning laws, regional collaboration and advocacy, the creation of new affordable housing and the preservation of existing affordable housing. Each recommendation pointed towards a larger goal of allowing low- and middle-income New Haveners to live in safe and convenient housing without going bankrupt in the process.

“There’s been a robust public engagement from stakeholders at meetings, between meetings,” said Wooster Square Alder Aaron Greenberg, who serves as the non-voting facilitator of the task force. ​“Over the course of these meetings, we’ve heard from residents, from state and fed policy experts, from elected officials, developers, advocates, activists. It’s been a really robust and important discussion.”

Greenberg promised that the task force will release a final draft of its recommendations several days before the task force’s Jan. 24 vote, so that the public can have a chance to review and provide comments via email. After the task force’s vote on Jan. 24, it will deliver its recommendations to the Board of Alders, which which can then host its own set of public hearings and deliberations around which proposed policies to enact as city law.

The task force itself was created in March 2018, and held meetings in June, July, September, October, and November of last year. Dozens of New Haveners testified for hours about the dire need in this city for housing for working class and middle class New Haveners at a time when the city’s downtown is experiencing a construction boom in primarily market rate and luxury housing.

Over the past six months, affordable housing activists have closely monitored the task force’s progress and have even issued their own comprehensive set of recommendations on the issue.

On Wednesday night, Greenberg said the task force has broken out its recommendations into six key areas: ensuring continued action on the creation and preservation of affordable housing; ensuring the city has a wide spectrum of housing options for people of all income levels; increased land use efficiency; working regionally to promote affordable housing and economic, racial, and ethnic integration; improving the quality and stability of existing affordable housing; and improving access to affordable housing resources.

The task force members who took the lead in drafting recommendations within each of those policy areas presented their ideas Tuesday night to the roughly two dozen members of the public sitting in the back rows of the Aldermanic Chambers.

Continued Action

Greenberg pointed out that the city has a number of boards, departments, and agencies that work on issues related to affordable housing, but no single dedicated administrative or legislative body charged with monitoring, addressing, and making recommendations around affordable housing.

“We are recommending the Board of Alders create a permanent Affordable Housing Commission,” he said, ​“to oversee city, state, and federal policy; make recommendations, request document, invite guests, and hold public hearings on affordable housing.”

This body should be staffed by the executive director of the city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative (LCI), he said, and should include elected officials, subject experts, and affected residents. He said the body should be responsible for issuing an annual report to the Board of Alders to check in on the status of affordable housing in the city.

Regional Pressure

Elm City Communities / Housing Authority of New Haven Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton walked through some of the draft recommendations around creating new affordable housing inside and outside of New Haven, with an emphasis on putting pressure on surrounding suburbs to do their part in housing low- and middle-income residents.

She said that the 15 towns and cities in South Central Connecticut have a population of around 570,000. Around 7 percent of the housing units in the region are affordable, she said, and the vast majority of those affordable housing units fall in New Haven, West Haven, and Meriden.

“Clearly, this issue needs to be addressed on a regional basis,” she said, so that towns like Bethany, Madison, Branford, and others cannot get away with having between 1 and 5 percent of their housing units affordable in comparison to New Haven’s 30 percent.

Some of her recommendations included:

• Have the city engage the South Central Regional Council of Government (SCRCOG) to study and address the disproportionate siting of affordable housing in cities like New Haven, and the significant under-representation of said housing in surrounding suburbs.

• Support statewide legislation that expands the geographic authority of the Housing Authority of New Haven so that it can develop affordable housing in surrounding towns and suburbs.

• Advocate for the change of state statute language like ​“protecting community character” that tend to preclude the development of low-income housing in wealthier suburbs.

DuBois-Walton also listed a suite of draft recommendations around creating and preserving affordable housing within New Haven. During a previous task force meeting, DuBois-Walton and LCI Executive Director Serena Neal-Sanjurjo said the city currently needs more than 25,000 new affordable housing units to meet resident demand.

Those city-specific recommendations included:

• Expand permitting for rooming houses, and adjust current zoning law regarding accessory dwelling units and minimum lot area requirements.

• Establish a housing trust fund that would direct resources earned from market rate housing developments towards the creation of new affordable housing.

• Advocate for additional state and federal dollars to focus on transit-oriented development and reinvestment in quality housing in low-income neighborhoods.

Land Use

City Plan Commission Chair Ed Mattison took the lead on recommendations related to zoning law changes with the goal of increasing land use efficiency.

“There’s only a certain amount of land in the city,” he said. ​“We don’t always use it as well as we might.”

Mattison’s recommendations included:

• Create an inventory of empty lots and make a serious effort to figure out who the owners are and what the obstacles are to building new housing on them.

• Pass an inclusionary zoning ordinance that would require private developers to set aside a certain percentage of housing units in new developments to be affordable. Mattison advocated for hiring experts on inclusionary zoning to conduct a study of New Haven’s housing developments and issue its own recommendations as to what exactly a New Haven inclusionary zoning ordinance should look like, so that ​“we get the most housing we could get out of these developers,” he said.

• Allow single-family houses to rent two rooms to lodgers, rather than just one.

• Further reduce off-street parking requirements.

• Amend zoning law to allow housing in business districts.

• Ease regulations on cooperative living arrangements, and increasing regulations on AirBnB and other short-term rentals.

Improve Quality Of Existing Affordable Housing

Fair Rent Commissioner Otis Johnson, Jr. said one of the keys to ensuring that the city’s current stock of affordable housing is safe, clean, and well-maintained is to recommit to the department he heads.

“The Board of Alders and the administration should reaffirm its commitment,” he said, ​“to the mission of the Fair Rent Commission and ultimately provide the necessary staffing to be effective in assisting tenants with affordability.”

Some of his other recommendations included:

• Allow the Economic Development Corporation of New Haven to take over the housing and redevelopment work currently housed in LCI.

• Request that the City Plan Commission make recommendations on number of rooming houses the city needs, and what changes in zoning laws would encourage the creation of that number.

• Provide additional staff to LCI office of housing code enforcement to enhance housing code inspection process.

• Work with state and federal agencies to investigate and seek criminal penalties for property owners who are not in compliance with housing code law.

Accessibility

Christian Community Action Executive Director Bonita Grubbs rounded out the presentation of draft recommendations by talking about how to ensure that all city residents are aware of existing resources designed to support families in need of affordable housing.

She called for the city to invest in a database and local system that accurately documents the existence of affordable housing resources in New Haven.

“The system should be user friendly and easy for residents to access and navigate,” she said.

Some of her other recommendations included:

• Advocate for a statewide and regional database for affordable housing.

• Create a down-payment security deposit assistance program.

• Develop a pool of funds to be used for rapid rehousing to help address homelessness and housing instability.

“This is a sense,” Greenberg said, ​“a pretty detailed sense, but a sense of the direction the task force is going based on all the conversation we’ve had.”

He reiterated that the task force will have a final vote on the recommendations on Jan. 24 at 6 p.m. at City Hall. Once the recommendations are sent to the Board of Alders, he said, a whole new process of committee hearings and deliberations will begin. The public will then have opportunity to share further comments, suggestions, and input on the various recommendations before anything is written into law.

“I would encourage you to remain involved,” he said to the city residents and activists sitting in the Aldermanic Chambers before him, ​“because this conversation has just been getting started.”