Open Communities Alliance chart
Demographic data for Woodbridge vs. Southern Connecticut region.
Can a suburb that is more than 15 percent Asian American still be segregated, exclusive, and racist?
That question has emerged in a months-long dispute over whether or not Woodbridge should change its zoning laws to allow for multi-family housing in every residential district in the disproportionately white and wealthy town.
Webex images
Woobridge commissioner Paul Schatz and Yale law student Hannah Abelow at last week’s hearing.
The question came up towards the end of the latest virtual public hearing in the case, which the Woodbridge Town Planning & Zoning Commissioners are slated to deliberate on next month before taking a vote in June.
The ongoing rezoning case has sparked the attention and participation of New Haveners interested in the regional roots of segregation and racism.
Though taking up no more than two minutes of a four-hour virtual hearing hosted Monday night by the Woodbridge Town Planning & Zoning Commission, the debate mirrored previous instances in this very case of commissioners, Yale Law School students, and members of the public grappling directly with the connection between de facto racist outcomes and seemingly race-neutral land use laws.
And it touched on what has become a frequent point of contention in state and nationwide discussions about racial bias and exclusionary zoning. In March, a liberal Democratic state lawmaker from Vernon said during a state legislative hearing that Asian Americans have “never been discriminated against,” and then backtracked and apologized in the wake of bipartisan outrage. Also last month, two Gold Coast Republicans who are also Asian American demanded that Mayor Justin Elicker apologize for calling their towns’ zoning laws racist.
All of this has played out in the shadow of a nationwide surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans during the Covid pandemic, and in the recent massacre of eight people — including six Asian American female spa workers—in Atlanta, prompting a renewed local and nationwide call for amplifying the diverse voices, concerns, and experiences of members of the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community.
“Why Didn’t You Include Asians?”
Thomas Breen photo
This ongoing debate made its way to the Woodbridge Town Planning & Zoning Commission meeting Monday night when commissioner Paul Schatz asked Yale Law School student Hannah Abelow — one of the lead lawyers-in-training representing Open Community Alliance’s (OCA) multi-family zoning amendment application — why she and her colleagues have only focused on certain minority population statistics when making their case that Woodbridge is an exclusive suburb.
He pointed to a section of an April 1 letter by the OCA team that stated that the Amity Regional School District student population is only 3 percent Black, while the New Haven School District is 37 percent Black.
He also referenced the original application document, including a section entitled “Woodbridge is Racially Segregated.” In that section, the civil-rights team wrote that Woodbridge’s population is 74.8 percent white, 2.7 percent Black, and 5.6 percent Hispanic, in comparison to the regional demographic breakdown of 63.3 percent white, 13.5 percent Black, and 16.5 percent Hispanic.
“Why didn’t you include Asians in any of your statistics?” he asked.
“I think for us, what we are trying to focus on is: What does the data show [about] what populations are most impacted by the exclusionary housing policies that are on the books in Woodbridge and so many other towns?” Abelow replied. “Which populations are in greatest need of housing and have the lowest comparative median incomes and racial wealth gaps and those sorts of metrics?”
That is what the OCA group has tried to emphasize when describing the New Haven suburb’s history and present state of racial segregation, she said.
Looking at who has been excluded, she said, one invariably finds that Woodbridge is home to significantly fewer Black and Hispanic residents than live in surrounding towns and cities and in the region as a whole.
“I have no comment on what other groups are or are not included in Woodbridge,” Abelow said.
Schatz replied that, according to 2018 U.S. Census numbers, including those referenced in the original OCA application, Woodbridge’s population is roughly 15.3 percent Asian.
Therefore, the town’s “total minority population exceeds at least 23 percent,” Schatz said, “and it’s not just the 3 percent cited in this statistic.”
“The Asian Community Is Ignored”
Monday night’s hearing wasn’t the first time in this five-months-and-counting Woodbridge rezoning case that the specific debate around racially exclusionary zoning laws and the town’s current Asian American population has come up.
During the first public hearing, back on Nov. 30, several Asian American residents of Woodbridge spoke up in opposition to the application’s claims that their home town is somehow racist.
“I’m not white. I’m Asian,” said Frank Wang, who said he moved from New Haven to Woodbridge 15 years ago. He described accusations that the town is racist as a “false claim. Not being white is not a problem” here.
He focused the rest of his concerns instead on the potential impact of multi-family housing development on Woodbridge’s watershed and on potential contamination of well water.
During that same Nov. 30 hearing, another Asian American Woodbridge resident, Songnian Liu, also took umbrage with the application’s statements about the town’s racial exclusion.
He described herself as a “new immigrant” who moved to Woodbridge three years ago, and is the father of two sons.
He pointed to the “Woodbridge Is Racially Segregated” section of the original OCA application, and, after adding up the statistics shared — 74.8 percent white, 2.7 percent Black, 5.6 percent Hispanic — described the citation as “incomplete” and “inaccurate.”
“If you look at the racial composition in Woodbridge, the total number is not near or close to 100 percent. It is not a very good representation of the racial composition.”
“The population of the Asian community is ignored,” he said.
Liu said that the town’s Asian American population is close to 15.3 percent.
“It’s not very good to play the race card because we do have the migration of a certain population into this community. We cannot just say that Woodbridge is racially exclusive or that we have racial segregation.”
Liu also said that roughly 20 percent of Woodbridge residents were born in a foreign country.
“We do have plenty of immigrants that already live in Woodbridge, so it’s not good to consider the race as an excuse to propose such a kind of proposal.”
Multi-Family Housing Debate Is “Also About Class”
New Haven’s Margaret Lee offered a different take on the Woodbridge rezoning application’s racial framing, and in particular on Monday night’s back-and-forth between Schatz and Abelow about which demographic data to emphasize when talking about whether or not Woodbridge is an exclusive and segregated town.
“Just because there are Asian people in a community, it doesn’t automatically mean that we don’t have to ask hard questions about why there aren’t also Black and Latinx people in that community,” Lee told the Independent.
While Lee is not involved in the Woodbridge rezoning case, the Independent reached out to her for her thoughts on the matter following her recent appearance on WNHH’s “Dateline New Haven” with fellow Collab co-founder Caroline Tanbee Smith to talk about responding to Anti-Asian violence.
In that March 23 radio show (which you can watch in full above), Lee criticized the “model minority myth” for obscuring the rapidly increasing racial wealth gap among Asian Americans, for glossing over the “poverty and discrimination and trauma” experienced by many Asian Americans, and for diminishing “the collective struggle against white supremacy.”
Lee raised similar concerns when asked for a comment on Monday night’s Woodbridge-focused debate.
“Let’s not make the Asian people who live in Woodbridge just simply Asian people, lumped in with poor Asian people,” she said.
When talking about racial exclusion in the leafy New Haven suburb, one must look not only at which specific people are underrepresented in the community — such as Black and Hispanic residents — but also at the intersection of race and class.
“Let’s get more nuanced and specific when we point to communities of color. Who are we talking about, and what is their experience? Instead of lumping everybody into the same category.”
“To me,” Lee continued, “the multi-family housing debate is about race, and it’s also about class. Those two things are inextricably linked.”
In her recent interview on WNHH in the immediate aftermath of the Atlanta murders, Lee offered a paradigm for thinking about the Asian American experience more broadly that transcends the type of debate that took place during Woodbridge’s zoning commission meeting, and that has played out in recent state legislative hearings and post-hearing disputes.
“Asians have been a part of the struggle for a long time,” Lee said in late March. “We haven’t just been silent. We haven’t just been victimized and made the model minority.
“We fought in the Civil War. We were a part of labor strikes from the beginning of the railroads and onward into the 60s. We were part of the Black Power movement. We fought in World War II. We spoke up against the internment camps. We fought for birthright citizenship. There’s a history of that, too.”
She called on Asians and Asian Americans to “remember our legacy of fighting and being in solidarity,” and said she hopes the current political moment is one where elected officials and community organizations are pushed to “continue to include the Asian American experience, and the larger struggle for freedom and for justice.”
See below for previous coverage of this Woodbridge rezoning proposal.
• Suburb Housing Quest Enters New Phase
• Suburb Housing Pitch: Ditch Hearings
• Urban Lawyer/Suburban Zoner Seeks Right “Balance” In Housing Controversy
• Open-Housing Debate: Define Racism
• Open-Housing Quest Critics Champion Local Control
• Suburban Zoning Debate Gets Personal
• City, ‘Burb Clash On Open-Housing Quest
• Urban Housing Lauded; Suburbs Challenged