Choose people over highways
As highways go, the Merritt Parkway isn’t bad. Though it carries thousands of cars a day and is likely to be jammed up at any given hour, it’s relatively scenic and even pastoral. You could even call it — maybe, in the right mood — nice.
Still, you wouldn’t want to get carried away. The Merritt Parkway is how you get from Trumbull to Greenwich, or Stratford to Stamford, or some combination thereof. It’s fine compared to Interstate 95, and it’s certainly historic — a throwback to the Robert Moses era when parkways were an escape from the crowded city and meant for enjoying in their own right. The bridges that pass over it are fun to examine in minute detail as you’re sitting in a 45-minute backup.
But in the end, it’s a road. It’s utilitarian, and not much more. (Also, stop signs at entrance ramps are dangerous, not quaint.) So it was a little shocking to see the Merritt Parkway itself offered recently as justification against construction of a housing development in Fairfield.
“The building as proposed is incompatible with the scale and character of the Merritt Parkway,” the executive director of the Merritt Parkway Conservancy was quoted as saying at a recent public hearing on a proposed 94-unit rental complex in Fairfield. The conservancy is charged with preserving the parkway, and in this case that apparently means arguing against something it considers unsightly going up alongside it.
It’s hard to imagine a better encapsulation of our society’s preference for cars over people.
The conservancy is free to make its arguments. But the town should reject them outright. It’s nice to look at trees as you sit in traffic, but we don’t need to pretend it’s some fundamental right. Historic or not, the Merritt Parkway is not a determinant of what we build alongside it.
This particular project has been proposed under state law Section 8-30g, the bane of the suburbs but one of the only methods available to build affordable housing in places that don’t want it. Compared to elsewhere in the county, Fairfield is not an egregious offender, and has a few varieties of housing options available. Still, mirroring most of its neighbors, most homes are singlefamily, and a minuscule percentage qualify as affordable.
The plot of land in question is where Black Rock Turnpike meets the Merritt; viewed from above, the neighborhood is mostly trees. It’s well-established that Fairfield County has a housing crisis, particularly in terms of affordability. According to the Regional Plan Association, in the past 20 years the number of costburdened households in Fairfield County who are at greater risk of eviction or foreclosure has increased from 31.5 percent to 35.7 percent. Yet this development, which wouldn’t seem to be in anyone’s way, has attracted all the predictable complaints and objections.
There was, for instance, a complaint about “greed” on the part of the developer. It’s hard to know what to do with this. Is the objection to people making money? We still live in a capitalist society. Maybe these critics think any new housing must be publicly funded. That’s the only logical alternative to “greedy” developers, but seems unlikely to quiet criticism.
In addition, there were complaints about wastewater and traffic, both of which are legitimate but workable, and neither of which should be justified to kill an otherwise worthy project. Like most places, the community can safely absorb new construction. And worries about fitting in to the neighborhood fall flat to anyone familiar with Black Rock Turnpike to the south, an endless run of plazas and strip malls that doesn’t scream out “historic character.”
This proposal is a stand-in for the wider debate over affordable housing, and housing development in general, which rages even as Connecticut stagnates in population. It will not grow again until we build the kind of places people want to live and can afford to live in.
It’s an argument that won’t be settled by one project, but that could be in for an overhaul depending on what the state Legislature decides. Whatever decision is made on this plan, let’s not turn the view from the highway into a precedent-setting obstacle. People, not cars.