State doomed to sink without housing fix

The best read on the state of Connecticut’s website can be found on the Department of Housing page in a document called “Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice.” Maybe that seems like a low bar, and the title makes it sound about as scintillating as a terms of service agreement. In fact, the report summarizes as well as anything why Connecticut looks the way it does and where it goes from here.

“By any measure, Connecticut is highly racially and ethnically segregated,” the report says, in the type of straightforward language not always associated with state bureaucracy. The state has people from many backgrounds, but they don’t tend to live near each other. The Bridgeport area, the report notes, is by one measure the eighthmost segregated metropolitan region of 362 nationally; the New Haven area ranks 20th.

Segregation in Connecticut tends to come up — when it’s mentioned at all — in terms of schools, but the problem goes far beyond that. Quoting from the report again, “National statistics reveal that in 2009, the wealth of nonHispanic whites was 21.5 times that of blacks, and 6.2 times that of Hispanics. Such wealth, often accumulated over generations, paves the way for investments in education and homes in thriving neighborhoods for the next generation. As a result, wealth disparity plays a critical role in perpetuating segregation.”

Those differences in family wealth date back to slavery and centuries of discrimination that was so built into the system that people alive today can claim to hardly notice even as they benefit from it daily. On economic terms, it means dismissing the potential contributions of thousands of people who could help bring the state up.

Efforts to address these inequities, to the extent they’ve been tried, often focus on school districts, with rich towns reacting with fury at any suggestion their historic advantages might be mitigated. But school districts are based on where people live, and it’s residential segregation that drives the trends. Attempts to tackle housing segregation if anything invite even more rage.

The state is required under longstanding federal rules to try it anyway. It needs to regularly come up with an analysis of impediments to affordable housing and then take steps to overcome those impediments. This act of “affirmatively furthering” fair housing — as in, doing more than simply not blocking affordable housing, but working positively toward its inclusion in the community — dates to the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. Its rules were reinforced under President Barack Obama, but are, no surprise, under assault from his successor.

In Connecticut, Seila MosqueraBruno is only the second housing commissioner following the department’s introduction as a standalone agency under Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. Her background, with decades running a nonprofit housing agency in New Haven, on the surface contrasts with her predecessor, the former first selectwoman of Darien, but there’s plenty of overlap — the state has lots of affordable housing in the New Havens and very little in the Dariens.

In a recent interview at her Hartford office, MosqueraBruno was clear on what she doesn’t want — mandates. She supports publicprivate partnerships, believes people should have choices and wants affordable housing to be among the options they can choose. She cites examples in Kent and other Litchfield County towns where local leaders recognized they had a problem and worked together, and with the state, to find a solution on housing.

She has doubts about the state’s 830g regulation that allows local zoning decisions to be overridden in certain cases where a town lacks affordable housing, even as she understands why it’s necessary. “I would rather work with people wherever possible,” she said.

The department is now seeking bids to update its Analysis of Impediments report. With little help expected from the federal government, the state will be left alone to tackle the problems the report spells out: “As mounting social science research confirms the significant role that housing location plays in enabling people to access and make the most of educational, economic, employment and social opportunities, it is clear that affordable housing policy is critical to ensuring a promising future for every resident of Connecticut and the state itself.”

As far as how to get there, “I believe in choice,” MosqueraBruno says. “I don’t like mandates.”

It’s a fine principle, but the history is clear. Rich, white towns will almost never choose affordable housing on their own. Without stronger mandates, the state can expect the status quo. For reasons that range from economic to moral, we have to do better than that.