Putting summer’s marches into action

On multiple fronts, across numerous venues, the battle to desegregate Connecticut and bring affordable housing to towns that deny it is gaining traction. Predictably, the forces that would prefer to maintain the status quo are building their own strength and honing their well-worn arguments. Whoever wins the debate could help shape the future of the state.

What remains unclear is where the governor, who hails from one of the richest towns in America, will fall on the question. As always, much will depend on legislators from the suburbs, where many constituents are satisfied with the way things are but might have been convinced by events over the past year that there are better ways.

There’s even change at the federal level. The Biden administration is taking quick steps to overturn the worst excesses of the Trump presidency, which was itself an extended temper tantrum aimed at undoing Barack Obama’s time in office. The result is the federal government has again declared that it “has a critical role to play in overcoming and redressing (the) history of discrimination ... by applying and enforcing federal civil rights and fair housing laws.”

This is a major step, especially considering Trump campaigned for reelection in part on the threat to suburbs from scary housing projects that Democrats wanted to build.

The kind of construction that would start to desegregate Connecticut’s suburbs doesn’t look anything like the public housing of Trump voters’ nightmares. The case for building it is both moral and practical.

Much attention on this issue has gone to Desegregate CT, a coalition shining a light on the state’s barriers to change and seeking an overhaul in zoning codes. There’s a parallel effort underway from the Open Communities Alliance, a nonprofit that prefers to focus on laws already on Connecticut’s books that prohibit housing discrimination and encourage multifamily dwellings. Open Communities is pushing a “Fair Share” plan that would move affordable housing out of where it currently lives — mostly in cities — and into the suburbs and rural areas. And it is in the midst of a test case in bucolic Woodbridge.

Despite neighbors’ protestations, the Woodbridge proposal is innocuous in the extreme. It’s a plan for a four-unit multifamily home in a residential neighborhood that would be mostly indistinguishable from single-family homes elsewhere in town. The group is also seeking a change in the zoning code that would permit such developments in much the way single-family homes are already allowed.

It would be both a major change and pretty perfunctory. Most people likely wouldn’t notice. Nevertheless, a segment of the population has responded with rage, claiming they will see a decline in property values, increase in crime and the end of Woodbridge as they know it. “I do not need forced affordable housing shoved down my throat,” one opponent’s letter reads.

This has always been the response to plans like this — pure emotion, with a focus only on what is being lost.

What’s different now, in theory, is that many of Connecticut’s quaintest suburbs were recently the scene of rallies and demonstrations in the cause of racial equity. Some participants may not have known how to turn those words into action, but now they have a way. They can open their cloistered communities to affordable housing and make those words from last summer mean something. Whether they outnumber their loudest opponents is uncertain.

That’s the moral case for the expansion of affordable housing, but there’s also a practical case. That case entails the benefits of bringing people out of poverty, as housing reform has been proven to do. It is better for the state to have fewer people in need of social services and better able to reach their earning (and taxpaying) potential. And a building boom that would accompany a rise in housing developments across the state would be welcome for a state in need of good jobs news.

Not every effort is going to be successful. But with forward momentum at the local, state and federal level, positive change is on the horizon. It is up to the Legislature not only to minimize harm, but actively get out in front of this movement. There’s more to reform than marching.