Why Conn. communities need land use deregulation
Southwestern Connecticut is a highly desirable place to live, with access to high-wage jobs, cultural attractions, and natural beauty. But it’s not an easy place to find a home. Zillow estimates that a typical single-family home in Fairfield County costs more than half a million dollars, at least $200,000 more than any other Connecticut county. That reflects Fairfield’s access to the New York job market, but it’s also a symptom of a statewide housing shortage.
The root cause of the housing shortage is the overregulation of land use.
Property owners in Southwestern Connecticut are regulated more strictly than in most other highincome areas in the United States, including Northern Virginia and even Silicon Valley. In 2019, Yale Law professor Bob Ellickson, a living legend among property rights advocates, documented the prevalence of large lot zoning in Greater New Haven. Ellickson shows that zoning in much of the region prevents not only apartments but also single-family houses with yards smaller than one acre. A one-acre lot size requirement is five times larger than that of the typical house built in America today.
There’s a sturdy research consensus that permitting new housing construction lowers rents and home prices. According to one typical estimate, a 3 percent increase in the number of homes lowers rents by about 2 percent.
A new movement informed by this research — one that says “yes” to attainable housing, property rights, and inclusion — is afoot nationally and in Connecticut. We’ve both joined like-minded neighbors in speaking out in favor of property rights and housing construction at local hearings in our own communities. And we also recognize that statelevel legislation protecting property owners from regulatory overreach is a necessary part of the solution.
Towns see the benefits of land use regulations clearly, but they often miss the costs. The benefits tend to accrue to neighbors of a potential new development. Understandably, neighbors may see an advantage to rules that prevent new construction that might increase traffic or change the view from their kitchen windows. Town regulations reflect those concerns.
But these rules come with serious costs, including strained household budgets, young adults priced out of the town where they grew up, and even homelessness. Relaxing these regulations would give more people the opportunity to access housing they can afford by sharing the costs of expensive land across multiple households in apartment buildings, duplexes, or fourplexes.
Unlike the benefits, the costs of each town’s regulations are spread across the region, so each town and its voters have little incentive to act. But state policymakers can afford to take a broader view that encompasses costs and benefits. Legislatures can play a role in setting some limits on town regulatory authority.
Bipartisan bills have been introduced or passed that directly rein in local regulatory authority in several states. In North Carolina, for example, the legislature banned minimum size requirements for single-family houses. New Hampshire is considering bills that would cap minimum lot sizes and allow at least four homes on any lot served by water and sewer.
A current proposal in Connecticut takes a less direct approach to easing local restrictions. The bill’s most notable provision would require towns to allow moderate-density housing on at least half the land within a half mile of each transit station, excluding land without water and sewer infrastructure. Among other things, it would also ease some parking requirements and remove language that requires towns to consider neighborhood “character” and existing home values when crafting zoning rules. This approach, similar to a new Massachusetts law, leaves localities with control over many aspects of their urban development but requires most towns in Southwestern Connecticut to make modest changes to legalize some new, lowercost construction.
Small steps toward expanding development rights would open up each of the state’s localities to a bit more housing construction. This is a crucial step toward improved affordability and new opportunities for old and new residents to start building their own households in the Constitution State.