Businesses against pro-business reforms

Critics are nothing if not consistent.

Depending on what I write about, there are a few responses to this column I’m guaranteed to receive. If I write about crime, I’ll hear from people (always suburbanites) who are convinced they are in imminent danger of being murdered at any given moment. If I write about affordable housing, I’ll get people asking if I want it built in my backyard. (For the record: Yes, please.) And if I write about a general lack of housing, I’ll hear from people who say I have it backward — Connecticut needs jobs, they say; take care of that and then worry about housing.

Those respondents might be interested to know the state’s top business lobby disagrees with them.

The Connecticut Business and Industry Association, which represents thousands of large and small businesses in a variety of sectors across the state, recently released its policy priorities for 2022, which focus on ways to strengthen the state economy. Atop the list is boosting the state’s anemic job growth, just 0.1 percent from 2010 to 2021.

The biggest problem? Finding and keeping workers. “Let’s address workforce challenges that have simmered for years because of our sluggish population growth,” CBIA president and CEO Chris DiPentima says. “Eighty percent of employers are struggling to find and retain workers, and 35 percent say the labor shortage is the greatest threat to growth.”

The jobs are there. We need people to fill them. The population of the state needs to grow, and that means we need more places to live, which means building new housing.

There’s a simple solution here, and it has nothing to do with cutting taxes. Our tax situation compares favorably with our neighbors, and as recent numbers show, the state’s wealthiest residents, the ones we’re always worried about chasing away to Florida, get an exceptionally good deal here. Top earners pay about 8 percent of their income in state and local taxes; for those at the bottom that number is 24 percent.

We need to build more housing. There has been a lot of talk on this issue in Connecticut in recent years, with the understanding that reform would require loosening up local zoning regulations that prevent the scale of building we need to see. Again this session there are proposals to allow multifamily housing, density and growth that would increase the state’s population and give workers a place to live, thus satisfying the state business community’s top concern.

CBIA isn’t supporting any of it. It’s not that the organization is against more housing. DiPentima and Eric Gjede, CBIA’s vice president for public policy, talked recently with the Hearst Connecticut Media editorial board about the need for more places to live in cities, with the conversion of unused office space a possibility worth supporting. Especially with the pandemic-driven move toward working from home, that space is likely to remain vacant, and transition to apartments should be encouraged.

But it can’t just be cities. As a starting point, all transit stops in any size town should allow multifamily housing in the immediate vicinity. This is as close to a nobrainer as it gets in planning, and is up for debate in this year’s Legislature.

That shouldn’t be where it stops. All towns should play a part in solving the housing crisis, and there’s an excellent proposal on the table to do just that, pushed by a coalition called Growing Together CT. There’s a public hearing scheduled in coming days.

Even beyond the need for workers to live in the state, there’s a strongly pro-business argument for such a proposal. Developers, after all, are businesses, plus there’s construction, real estate, suppliers and many other types of companies would hugely benefit from the plan passing.

The business lobby shouldn’t just support it; this should be its highest priority. It’s not.

DiPentima was clear that individual CBIA members are encouraged to push for policies even if the wider membership can’t get behind something, and the group’s leadership doesn’t make these calls alone. But why would a business group not support a pro-business policy that would directly benefit so many of its members?

There are moral reasons to build more housing, but those haven’t proven enough to sway the suburban-dominated Legislature. The economic questions, however, are not going away.

This, then, is the question for employers around the state: What do they want more, a growing Connecticut economy or their suburban neighborhoods to stay forever unchanged? Because they can’t have both.