Why Conn. communities need land use deregulation
My suspicions about you have been confirmed, Richard Blumenthal.
Speaking to the Retired Men’s Association of Greenwich, a group that includes Lex Luthor, Roy Cohn, Loki and Hans Gruber, the senator from Connecticut said: “I have heard nothing that would change my views on UFOs. I can’t say whether it would change yours . ... I haven’t heard of anything reliable or credible that would lead me to think UFOs are a threat to our country or our world right now.”
Notice how carefully worded that was?
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“I have heard nothing that would change my views on UFOs.” That would not exclude the possibility that he knows they exist, that he has been abducted and probed by them, that when he did Ancestry.com he turned out to have 2.3 percent Silurian Reptoid DNA. All he said was that his views had not changed.
“I can’t say whether it would change yours.” This is where he foot-faults. There’s apparently an “it.” And “it” could conceivably “change the views” of someone who was not already aware that the British Royal Family are shape-shifting reptilian humanoids from the Alpha Draconis star system, which is why they say such weird, detachedsounding things about Meghan Markle, who is definitely onto them. (Prince Andrew claims that, for part of his life, he could not sweat. Space lizards also do not sweat.)
I wish Greenwich Time reporter Ken Borsuk had followed up on this. I’d like to think I would have, but that may just be what Lemurians call “l’esprit de l’escalier” (literally, “things you Earth creatures dwell on after we have erased 99 percent of your memories.”)
And finally: “I haven’t heard of anything reliable or credible that would lead me to think UFOs are a threat to our country or our world right now.”
Why did he say those last two words? “Not right now” implies later, doesn’t it?
Reading between the lines, Blumenthal essentially said, “Based on what I already know, nothing these space aliens do would surprise me, including ‘it,’ but if you knew about ‘it’ you’d maybe be screaming in terror. Anyway, you’ve got three to six months to get your affairs in order.”
I would ask Borsuk about this, but he has disappeared. No one has seen him for several minutes. I would use exclamation points, but I am not allowed to. Why do you think that is?
Why was a Retired Greenwich Man (I believe it was Pennywise the Clown) asking Blumenthal this question? Because tucked into last year’s 5,500-page $2.3 trillion appropriations bill is a requirement that the government produce a report divulging everything it knows about “anomalous aerial vehicles.”
We had to pay $2.3 trillion to pry loose the truth.
When that report comes out, according to what former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told highly reputable Fox journalist Maria Bartiromo, it will have big news about even more sightings than we’re currently aware of.
And though Ratcliffe was voted by his high school classmates as “Least Likely to Ever Hold a Job Title Containing the Word ‘Intelligence’,” I think we have to take him seriously because he supports my theory.
Anyway, it’s not just a theory. Last April, the U.S. Navy confirmed three UFO incidents and released video of them shot by jet fighter planes.
That should have been really big news, but as Nate Bargatze, who has a new Netflix comedy special but is probably also a principal research scientist with Northrup Grumman, says: 2020 was so crowded with news that “they said there were UFOs and nobody cared.”
As Bargatze notes, it wasn’t even a lead item. More like, “And that’s the news for tonight. Also, alien spacecraft are here. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
Bargatze says he told his wife that UFOs are officially real “and she just went about her day.”
Now, I know some of you are going to try to pick apart my ideas, and I just want to say that, as an American, I am entitled to crackpot beliefs just like everybody else.
I keep tabs on the anti-vaccine movement here in Connecticut, and, believe me, I am making way more sense in this column than they do. On Tuesday, one of them posted on the CT Freedom Alliance Facebook page an article headlined “Government of Norway indicted for crimes against humanity.”
Did you miss that story? The one where the whole government of Norway was indicted for its COVID policies? And there’s a “2nd Nuremberg tribunal,” because this is so much like the Third Reich?
So don’t tell me I can’t ask perfectly valid, rational questions about space aliens. In fact, let me make one final observation. I’m not pointing any fingers. I’ll leave that to E.T.
But I have seen Dick Blumenthal go jogging. More than once. Including in Los Angeles in the summer. I have never seen him sweat.
Do the math.
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Thursday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.
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.
“I haven’t heard of anything reliable or credible that would lead me to think UFOs are a threat to our country or our world right now.”
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal
Emily Hamilton and Salim Furth are senior research fellows and co-directors of the Urbanity Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.