A flashpoint in the racial equity debate
How a plan for apartments in Woodbridge has become a divisive issue
The contrast between New Haven and its suburban neighbor Woodbridge is impossible to miss. In the city, duplexes and triplexes are packed side by side, with cars and motorcycles zipping through busy streets. Just over the line in Woodbridge, the urban density gives way to a colonnade of trees. Single-family homes, separated by wide lawns and stone walls, sit far back from the road.
The differences run far deeper than what is visible. In New Haven, a city of 130,000, the median household income is $42,222; in Woodbridge, a town of 8,750, it’s $157,610, nearly four times larger. New Haven residents are less than half white, 5% Asian, about a third Latinx and a third Black, while those in Woodbridge are more than three-quarters white, about 15% Asian and less than 10% Black and Latinx.
In a bid to upend this socioeconomic and racial divide — which exists between cities and suburbs across Connecticut — a team of civil rights attorneys and Yale Law School students has spent the last eight months presenting their case to the Woodbridge plan and zoning commission that the sharp differences between the city and its quiet suburb are not only pernicious, but also unlawful.
At issue is a modest white house at 2 Orchard Road in Woodbridge, where the grass is starting to grow long. The legal team has submitted an application to the zoning commission to turn this 1.5 acre plot of land,
zoned for a single-family home, into a four-unit development, with half of the apartments reserved for tenants receiving rental assistance.
But the implications run far deeper than a small lot in Woodbridge.
The zoning dispute has become a flashpoint in a heated battle playing out across Connecticut that challenges the tradition of investing tremendous power in town boards. The reason, advocates say, is simple: local control has allowed towns for generations to make rules that shut out the poor and people of color, perpetuating a legacy of inequity and discrimination.
If accepted, the proposal would not only alter the corner of Orchard and Newton Roads, but also upend the town’s zoning map, rezoning every residential district in Woodbridge to permit multifamily housing, which is currently prohibited everywhere.
Proponents of the plan hope the case will have statewide consequences, unlocking multifamily development in towns across Connecticut that have used restrictive zoning policies to maintain single-family tracts. They see their effort, which is likely for headed for the courts, as an overdue remedy for the ever-deepening affordable housing crisis in Connecticut, a state that ranks third highest in the nation in terms of income inequality.
But opposition to change — both in Woodbridge and at the state legislature, where several related measures are pending — runs deep.
Keeping the city out
Liva Andrejeva-Wright and her husband lived in New Haven for more than a decade, renting a modest apartment while saving up to purchase their first home.
Last year, they moved into “the home of our dreams” in Woodbridge, a ranch-style house on a sequestered street two miles from 2 Orchard Road. Shaded by tall trees and encircled by a white fence, it’s a peaceful home, with more than enough room for their 5-year-old to play.
Andrejeva-Wright, 47, isn’t typically interested in local politics, but after receiving a flyer in the mail warning of the potential zoning changes, she sent a letter to the commission.
“I do believe that those who have the means are obligated to help those who are less fortunate, but that can be accomplished in ways other than forcibly imposing on residents of a suburban town, who choose to live there because of the lifestyle that is unique to that town,” she wrote.
As Andrejeva-Wright sees it, the debate is not about race. Instead, she said, it’s about whether new multifamily housing would strain local water and sewer systems, pointing to environmental and infrastructural concerns that have underpinned much of the resistance to the proposal.
Acknowledging the need for more affordable housing, she said there are areas of town closer to New Haven that might be better suited for it. A multifamily development would “completely change the area that we are in,” she said.
“For people like me that were done with living in a densely-populated area, if you choose to live here, this is kind of what you expect and you’d probably think about moving, if all of a sudden there was a four-family unit next door,” she said. “There’d be a lot more traffic, a lot more noise.”
Like Andrejeva-Wright, many Woodbridge homeowners opposed to the proposal have voiced fears that opening up the town to affordable housing would ruin the suburb’s atmosphere of large, secluded homes and winding wooded roads, which some feel they have earned.
“I worked very hard all my life to provide my family a safe and comfortable lifestyle in Woodbridge. I have paid higher taxes for all the opportunities this town offers and I have enjoyed living here. I do not need forced ‘affordable’ housing shoved down my throat or my neighbors,” Henry Misiak wrote to the commission.
For some, the proposal and its broader implications for rewriting town zoning have raised the looming specter of urbanization: by authorizing multifamily housing on every residential plot in town, would Woodbridge simply become an extension of New Haven?
Arthur and Suzanne Principe warned in a letter to the commission that if the proposal is accepted, “it will snowball into other changes.”
“People here in Woodbridge worked hard and saved money in order to buy and live in a quiet wooded area. I do not want to see our town turn into a greater section of New Haven,” they wrote.
During a public meeting in February, Jeffrey Kennedy, a member of the zoning commission, bristled at the notion that “We essentially have Yale Law School students telling us to … turn our town into a city.”
A fair share of housing
The civil rights attorneys in the Woodbridge case argue that local pushback to zoning changes is one of the primary reasons that the town’s zoning regulations have remained so conservative over the decades. Their application calls for the construction of multifamily housing “as of right,” meaning that future developments would not require a public hearing or a review by the town’s zoning commission.
“Many towns across the state, particularly wealthier, predominantly white towns use a range of strategies to limit the number of affordable housing units that can be built in town. What Woodbridge has done is particularly egregious,” said Erin Boggs, executive director of the Open Communities Alliance, a Hartford-based civil rights organization involved in the effort.
In Woodbridge, Boggs noted, only 0.2% of the land in town is available for duplexes and no land at all is available for multifamily housing (developments of three or more units). By prohibiting multifamily housing, Boggs and the Yale Law School team argue, Woodbridge has failed to comply with state laws that encourage affordable housing, as well as the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which prohibits housing discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin or sex.
But that stark dividing line between Woodbridge and New Haven matters too, Boggs said. The fact that Woodbridge is “adjacent to one of the major cities in our state with a real affordable housing crisis,” she said, is one of the reasons that Woodbridge has a responsibility to shoulder its share of the region’s affordable housing. New Haven’s “housing wage” — the annual wage needed to afford a two-bedroom in the city — is far below its median household income; the city’s eviction rate, at just over 4 evictions per day, is higher than the national average.
The concept of “fair share housing” has garnered the political spotlight in Connecticut this past year, as a slew of bills attempting to expand affordable housing and reduce local control are under consideration by state lawmakers.
One piece of proposed legislation, House Bill 6611, would require all towns and cities in the state — except those with high rates of poverty — to host a share of affordable housing. Another, Senate Bill 1024, would legalize the construction of accessory apartments statewide and prohibit municipalities from using vague terms such as “character” in zoning rules to block proposed projects.
“Exclusionary zoning of the kind we see in Connecticut effectively limits who can afford to live in a neighborhood by having these minimum land rules,” said Jack Dougherty, a Trinity College professor who is writing a book about segregation in the Hartford region.
The ramifications are profound. Across the state, generally whiter and wealthier areas corollate with better educational opportunities and outcomes, healthier nutrition and less food insecurity, as well as reduced rates of hospitalization due to health conditions like heart disease, diabetes and asthma. Those disparities can replicate over generations.
Zoning ordinances that discriminated outright on the basis of race were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1917. Reacting to that ruling, many towns passed zoning ordinances that perpetuated discrimination by excluding lower-class families. In the 1975 Mount Laurel case, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that zoning laws that result in class discrimination violate the state constitution — but in most of the country, zoning laws that are effectively class-based remain legal.
Unlike other discriminatory barriers of the early to mid-20th century — including mortgage redlining, race-restrictive covenants and segregated public housing developments — exclusionary zoning ordinances don’t directly refer to race, religion or nationality, Dougherty said.
Yet they have historically been used to carve up neighborhoods with restrictive land use rules such as minimum lot sizes and off-street parking requirements that segregated residents by wealth, thus becoming “a more sophisticated tool of housing discrimination” that has largely resisted the Fair Housing Act.
“You don’t have to have a ‘No blacks allowed’ sign on the edge of town in order to still be engaging in perpetuating zoning regulations that have a disparate impact,” Yale Law student Karen Anderson argued in a commission meeting in February.
Jean Molot, 57, and her husband moved to Woodbridge in 2001, after living briefly in New Haven and in New York City for many years. They were attracted to the good schools and an easy commute into the city. Molot said she paid little attention to the town’s zoning policies — until last year.
“I quickly became pretty horrified at what seemed to be an institutional, very deliberate agenda of keeping the zoning the way that it is, under the guise of open spaces, when really, it seems pretty clear to me, it was a way to keep people out who can’t afford to live here,” she said.
She said she’s been disappointed to hear neighbors raise concerns about how more affordable housing would burden the town infrastructure and local school system.
“To me, that’s all just a smoke screen for not wanting a particular type of person in this town,” she said. “And I don’t think that’s just racial; I think it’s also economic. But the two are so connected.”
Is single-family zoning racist?
The assertion from the civil rights lawyers that zoning policies in Woodbridge have functioned as a form of racial segregation has provoked fierce outcry in town.
“You essentially called Woodbridge a bunch of racists,” town commissioner Paul Schatz told the Yale Law team during a public meeting in late February.
Tim Herbst, a land-use attorney and former Republican candidate for governor who was hired last fall by about a dozen Woodbridge residents opposed to the proposal, said he “fundamentally rejects” the framing of the zoning debate as one of racial segregation.
“This is not a zero sum game, this isn’t about us versus them,” said Herbst, who also served as first selectman in Trumbull. “This is about how do we lift up all of our communities, cities and towns, and how do we come up with plans, at the local level, to develop affordable housing plans that make sense for those respective communities? I believe in local decision-making; I believe in local control.”
Woodbridge currently has only 43 affordable units — just 1.24% of its total housing stock. Under Connecticut state law, which requires municipalities to create or amend an affordable housing plan every five years, Woodbridge must develop its own plan by July 2022.
Resistance to the 2 Orchard Road proposal in Woodbridge echoes pushback to the affordable housing bills under consideration in the General Assembly, which has emerged in towns across the state.
At an April rally in Fairfield in support of local control of zoning, Rep. Kimberly Fiorello, R-Greenwich, told the Courant, “Our laws say you cannot discriminate on housing. There may be segregation, but people are free to move wherever they want. It’s a question of affordability. There are all skin tones that cannot afford to live in many, many towns.”
The issue, said Boggs, of the Open Communities Alliance, is not whether Woodbridge residents are “racist,” but rather whether the town’s policies are unlawful and result in disparate impacts.
“The policy is a large lot, single-family zoning policy, the impact — because of the history of segregation and discrimination — is to limit access for Black and Latino families who are disproportionately lower income and have less wealth,” she said.
For Molot, a longtime elementary school teacher, the impact of Woodbridge’s zoning ordinances is clear: her children grew up in an overwhelmingly white, affluent area that limited housing opportunities for outsiders. It’s something she regrets.
Two decades ago, when Molot’s family lived briefly in New Haven, her daughter attended a racially diverse preschool. The next year, she started kindergarten in Woodbridge. One day at school pick-up, her daughter asked, “Where are all the dark-skinned people, Mommy?”
“Actually having children of all different kinds of backgrounds sitting next to you on the bus, coming to your birthday parties, playing sports with you — they missed out on that, by us living in this town,” she said.