A new hope for affordable housing

It’s hard to believe. We may finally escape the “déjà vu vortex” that traps Greenwich affordable housing initiatives. Although the outlook is good, we won’t know if it’s time to celebrate a milestone break-through until the Representative Town Meeting’s Sept. 27 meeting.

This past February, after a Jan. 28 Zoom panel discussion on the need for greater housing diversity in Greenwich, sponsored by the Greenwich United Way Planning Council, I wrote a column lamenting the sense of déjà vu this discussion evoked.

Margarita Alban, chair of the Greenwich Planning and Zoning Commission, who was one of the panelists, said that among the affordable housing initiatives the commission’s housing task force was considering were a housing trust fund and inclusionary zoning.

Hardly new initiatives, I thought, remembering how often all the same things have been proposed in past years, going back at least into the 1980s. Flashbacks flooded my mind, and I felt the town was trapped in a déjà vu vortex.

During the 1970s, 1980s, and into the early 1990s, I devoted most of my volunteer energy to affordable housing advocacy, at the local and state levels. I was active in the Greenwich Housing Coalition and the Connecticut Housing Coalition, and was the affordable housing specialist for the Connecticut League of Women Voters, lobbying at the Capitol in Hartford on housing issues for a decade. I also served for six years on the Greenwich Housing Authority.

I recall how the town has been identifying affordable housing as a critical need for nearly half a century. Many committees have been formed, with thousands of volunteer hours spent on proposals to address this need. But in the end, these proposals have been rendered ineffectual, or abandoned, and mostly forgotten.

Although the affordable housing need continues to grow, addressing it has been a pretendexercise that wastes volunteer time. Despite four decades of high-volume lip service, there’s been no significant town commitment.

For example, a serious proposal for a housing trust fund died more than three decades ago, now completely forgotten. And a housing task force established after the RTM adopted the previous Plan of Conservation and Development in 2009 recommended creation of a Community Development Partnership. Critical to its success was the establishment of a housing trust fund and inclusionary zoning. But like many other proposals, this too fell by the wayside.

Now, faced with another housing trust fund proposal, the town has a new opportunity to address the need for affordable housing. And thanks to the work of the Planning and Zoning housing task force, and to the leadership of Planning and Zoning chair Alban, who has a strong commitment to meeting Greenwich’s affordable housing needs, and to Planning and Zoning Director Katie DeLuca, also deeply committed to meeting our affordable housing needs, it looks as if we’re finally finding a way out of that déjà vu vortex.

Also to be commended is the RTM special committee on the affordable housing trust that worked throughout the summer to make changes to the original proposal that came to the RTM in June, most notably regarding trust governance and composition of the Board of Trustees.

The affordable housing trust fund proposal now awaiting RTM approval seems about to become a reality, soon to be included as Article 8 in the land use chapter of the Greenwich Code of Ordinances.

This coming week the Finance, Health & Human Services, Land Use, and Legislative & Rules Committees will take it up. The committee votes that will be reported to the full RTM on Sept. 27 will hopefully be affirmative.

Alban, DeLuca, and the housing task force deserve most of the credit. But the timing is also significant, given the “local autonomy” hysteria in the face of 2021 legislative efforts to address the state’s affordable housing needs.

There’s an irony here. Viewed this way, the Greenwich housing trust fund proposal is testimony to the efficacy of state pressure. Indeed, the state’s strongest measure for breaking through exclusionary zoning barriers is integral to the proposal, which specifies a town objective to provide ten percent affordable housing as defined by section 8-30g of the Connecticut General Statutes and also a state mandated affordable housing plan.

The state offers an escape from the déjà vu vortex. It’s time to welcome this.