Paul Bass Photo
Roland Lemar pitches supporters over pizza. To his right: campaign Treasurer Hacibey Catalbasoglu, Manager Eli Sabin, state treasurer candidate Shawn Wooden.
We need to force suburbs to house more of the poor — and also enlist them in a joint effort to cut our municipal costs.
New Haven State Rep. Roland Lemar delivered that message about the current challenges facing Connecticut’s urban-suburban relationship during a reelection fundraiser and meet-and-greet.
Actually, Wednesday evening’s event was more of a “meet-and-greet-and-eat,” an issues discussion accented with a steady stream of fresh pies at Brick Oven Pizza, which has become a popular spot for politicians to hold campaign events. Kadir Catalbasoglu, who owns the business, is the father of Ward 1 Alder Hacibey Catalbasoglu, who’s also serving as treasurer of Democrat Lemar’s campaign for a fifth two-year term.
Lemar faces a challenge this November from Republican Eric Mastroianni (pictured) for the 96th General Assembly District, which includes New Haven’s East Rock and Wooster Square neighborhoods along with part of East Haven. (Click here for more on Mastroianni’s campaign, which had begun as a quest for the gubernatorial nomination.) Both candidates are seeking to raise $5,100 in small donations to qualify for $28,000 in matching dollars under Connecticut’s public-financing system.
As the sky outside broke into a thunderous storm, Lemar and the 20 supporters assembled at Brick Oven settled in for a question-and-answer session. Stephen Poland (pictured), who teaches modern Japanese literature at Yale and is active in East Rock politics, asked Lemar about how New Haven is managing growth. Lemar praised New Haven for pursuing “inclusive growth,” often requiring at least 20 percent of the units at new apartment complexes to have “affordable” rents.
Then he tore into the suburbs for using racially-motivated “zoning as a tool to segregate communities.” He said he wanted to “name names: Places like Milford have gone out of their way in the last few years to deny housing oportunities for victims of domestic violence,” lower-income families and homeless people. “These quaint little communities have done everything they can to keep people out,” he said.
Some suburban communities “lose their mind” if a developer seeks to add even a little affordable housing in a project, he said.
Among those listening was Anika Singh Lemar (pictured), a Yale-based attorney (and Lemar’s wife) currently taking on Branford on that very issue. (Read about that here.) Rep. Lemar called for the state to require all communities to insist on at least 20 percent of new housing developments over more than 10 units to be “affordable,” which is reserved for families earning 80 percent of the area median income (AMI). That’s still around $70,480 per year out of an $88,100 annual benchmark for a family of four.
Even that AMI figure is skewed because it includes wealthy suburbs, Lemar continued. He said some of the 20 percent of the reserved units should be “deeply affordable,” meaning people earning 30 percent of the AMI can rent them.
Yury Maciel-Andrews (pictured), a business manager for a local nonprofit, commended Lemar for the “deeply” adverb.
“Even when we talk about affordable housing, even ‘affordable housing’ in New Haven is truly not affordable,” she said. “I do feel people are being pushed out.” Rising rents pushed Maciel-Andrews, a single mom with two kids, out of East Rock. She got lucky and found a downtown two-bedroom for $1,300 a month, an increasingly elusive find.
Lemar, the legislature’s Planning & Development Committee co-chair, also proposed reforming “antiquated” suburban zoning laws and withholding discretionary state aid to towns that fail to comply.
Lemar asked the room a question: “If you had to guess how many school districts we have in Connecticut, would anyone like to proffer a guess?’’
Hamden Councilman Justin Farmer (pictured) proffered the answer: 151. Those districts combined have fewer students than some big cities serve with a single superintendent and a single science curriculum coordinator, Lemar continued. He said Connecticut cities and towns could save “millions” by forming consolidated regional school districts, 911 call centers (the state has 104 different ones), and IT departments.
Asked why Democrats have failed to promote that regionalization, Lemar responded that suburban legislators who dominate the legislature have stopped them. But he argued that attitudes are changing, especially in inner-ring suburbs like West Haven and Hamden, which have mill rates higher than New Haven’s.
“We can fix these problems. There are suburban legislators who get it. That wasn’t always the case,” Lemar said. He singled out his State Rep. Robyn Porter (pictured), who represents portions of both New Haven and Hamden, and Hamden State Reps. Mike D’Agostino and Josh Elliott as supporters of regional initiatives at the Capitol.
Yale history professor Paul Sabin (pictured) asked how Democrats are responding to nationwide Republican “assault on voting rights.” Connecticut Democrats are mostly playing defense, Lemar responded, so far successfully, against Republican efforts here to, for instance, require photo IDs at the polls. He and other Democrats support a proposal to restore voting rights to people on parole, which failed this past session.
Click on the video to watch the full discussion at Brick Oven Pizza.