Fiorello does not represent town

Greenwich is a wonderful town. There aren’t enough column inches in this space to simply list all the reasons why Greenwich is a top-notch, firstrate place to live, work, and raise a family. At the heart of it though, it’s the people. People who moved here yesterday and people who can trace their family back centuries. Greenwich is home to hundreds of noble charities, causes and associations filled with people dedicated to making the world a better place. Greenwichites donate their time, their wisdom, and yes, even their money in the name of fighting injustice, balancing the scales, protecting the future, and nurturing our children.

Greenwich mailboxes both snail mail and email are regularly stocked with requests for donations, invitations to fundraising galas, pleas for contributions, and reminders of ways you can benefit someone in need through your local actions. Throughout the years, Greenwich has always been a little town with a big heart. So with all that, how in the world did it get to a point where Greenwich is represented in Hartford by Kim Fiorello?

There’s a bill being debated in Hartford with the support of DesegregateCT, an organization that may have it’s heart in the right place but it’s head somewhere else entirely, which would require certain Connecticut towns to build certain types of housing within a certain distance from mass transportation centers to provide more affordable housing for certain people. The merits of the specifics of this bill are certainly open to debate but the idea that all human beings should have at least a base-level right to housing, something enshrined globally in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, should be to most people, fairly self-evident.

Unless you are state Rep. Kim Fiorello. If you’re Ms. Fiorello, your ability to access housing is analogous to seeing something pretty but unaffordable in a store window so you just have to move along and do without. How do we know this is what’s in her heart? You see, during that house bill debate Ms. Fiorello asked Alan Cavagnaro, a Planning & Zoning commissioner for South Windsor, “Is housing a right?” She also added, “Are you entitled to have the housing that you want?”

Trying to equate peoples “rights” with what people “want” however, is a red herring. Non-stupid people would instantly recognize that there are enormous differences between rights and wants, and Ms. Fiorello is a non-stupid person. But her phrasing was a set-up, and she was counting on Cavagnaro and others to misconstrue the differences. So when Cavagnaro wisely answered that housing, specifically the access to a basic “habitat,” is a right, Ms. Fiorello pounced in all her pre-prepared, Ayn Randian glory.

“Housing is not a right, because housing is built by other people,” Fiorello said. “It’s a want and there’s a variety of different housing that people may want. But housing is not a right. You don’t have a right to other people’s labor.”

Holy moley. In one breath she pretty much twisted the discussion around into one of those phony “makers” vs. “takers” arguments designed to scare the citizenry with stories of undesirable takers who either only want handouts or who’d rather smash the store window and steal the pretty unaffordables. But Mr. Cavagnaro never said he wanted a handout. Nobody, including the entirety of DesegregateCT, ever said they were looking for any kind of free housing. Greenwich resident and Harvard Law student Nick Abbott was perplexed that Fiorello would think people were looking for handouts, when all his generation is looking for are reasonably priced, accessible housing options so they can continue to live where they grew up.

But Ms. Fiorello is nothing if not a perfect echo of the current Republican ethos of promoting one’s own selfish interests without regard for anyone else or for society as a whole. Many Greenwichites read “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Virtue of Selfishness” in college, but then they grew up and realized it was better to be a caring, generous and inclusive member of your own community. Ms. Fiorello obviously has not. It’s a shame this wonderful town of wonderful people is represented by such a person.