Housing questions hit all corners of state

Darien, with some of the highest home prices in the state of Connecticut, hardly seems like a natural location for the front lines in the fight for affordable housing. It sounds more like the place where Connecticut’s status quo would make its last stand.

Evonne Klein doesn’t see it that way. Darien’s former first selectwoman championed affordable housing as her town’s leader, and later served as the state Department of Housing commissioner under Gov. Dannel Malloy. She knows the issue from both the local and state perspective.

Now is the time to start making real changes, she said.

“We’ve marched. After the marching, after the rallying, the hard work begins,” she said in a phone interview.

It starts with her belief that housing is a human right. “That’s how we were successful in Connecticut in reducing homelessness,” she said. “When you give a person a safe, sanitary, affordable place to live, people grow roots in a community. When you start with that base of belief, it gives you a greater understanding of the steps you need to make that happen.”

In a recent opinion piece, Klein laid out many of the obstacles toward housing equity. “Laws that require McMansion-size lots, unnecessary numbers of parking spaces and prohibit apartmentstyle homes all contribute to the injustice many of us have spent the summer marching against,” she wrote. “As ideas are proposed to fix these problems, it’s important to keep these facts in mind and the goal of desegregating the state at the forefront.”

She wrote in support of the efforts of Desegregate CT, a nascent coalition of advocates looking to make changes at the state level to bring diversity to Connecticut’s typically homogeneous suburbs. Not all its arguments are new, but the push for action in the wake of widespread marches for racial justice this year gives the issue extra salience.

With police reform having passed a special session of the Legislature, the next move should be housing, backers say. But if policing was a tough issue for the suburban-dominated state Assembly, housing promises to be just as difficult.

Still, there are natural starting points. “Some proposals are easy and are being done today,” Klein said, listing parking and water treatment requirements, two factors that are often used to slow down housing proposals, making them more expensive to fight for and sometimes leading to their abandonment.

Other ideas are more difficult, such as building affordable units “as of right.” That would mean a multifamily housing complex could be constructed just like any other dwelling, rather than having to go through drawn-out approval processes. “People think they need to have a say,” Klein said. “But they don’t have a say when someone builds an eight-bedroom house.”

Regardless of the specifics, she said, “This conversation needs to be had sooner rather than later.”

Darien is known more for the eightbedroom homes than anything that would be considered affordable, but the town has made some strides, including the development of an income-restricted housing complex now known as The Heights. That and the changes to Darien’s downtown were instrumental in Malloy naming Klein to lead the state housing agency.

She knows it’s nowhere near enough. Other developments that started under her term were later discontinued, and demand is so high that The Heights today has closed its waiting list.

And it can’t be left up to local leaders alone. Though zoning is treated as a strictly local issue in Connecticut, there is room for change at the state level, she said, pointing out that towns derive their zoning authority directly from state statute. Efforts to update those laws have run into barriers in the past, with some ideas including the denial of state grants or other funds for towns that don’t allow multifamily housing or meet minimum affordability requirements.

Those are the type of votes the Legislature has fought hardest against before, and likely would again, regardless of the national climate.

Still, Klein is one of a growing number who can see the ground shifting. “I live in Darien. People in Fairfield County have a certain reputation. I know that we’re not that reputation,” she said. “This is a county that is open and I do believe understands needs to be open to change to move forward.”