The tragedy of housing inequality
Segregation in Woodbridge echoes a pattern of silence across Connecticut
If we really want to provide opportunity, really want to provide equity, we can’t simply provide food stamps, day care, Medicaid and other Band-Aids and think those alone will solve the problem.
The saddest part of the housing controversy facing Woodbridge and its residents — the likelihood it will be sued if it rejects a small, affordable housing project on a single-family lot — is that it didn’t have to happen. The most hopeful part? It still doesn’t. The jam Woodbridge has gotten itself into — allowing virtually no housing for the folks who cut their lawns, make their lattes, care for their elderly parents, teach their children — is a jam lots of Connecticut towns could soon face.
Dozens of municipalities don’t allow multifamily housing: apartments, condos and, technically, more than one unit on a parcel — and dozens more use their zoning regulations and purposely don’t provide water and sewer infrastructure to severely limit the less-expensive homes many people need.
By doing so, Woodbridge and most towns keep housing prices high and, therefore, keep the working-class households out. Sure, you can come to town to fix our streets and collect our refuse and do all those other chores we need done, but please be gone by sundown.
It’s a story of segregation replayed by many wealthy suburbs that surround our small, beleaguered cities. The question is whether the residents who’ve created no homes for those who they depend upon — people who do important jobs but just don’t get paid that much — are motivated by racism and a fear of “the other,” as some claim, or are simply thoughtless, negligent and too wrapped up in themselves to care about others.
I was first asked to talk to Woodbridge officials and residents a decade ago. So I know the residents include thoughtful households who do care. Ditto for the folks living in more than 100 Connecticut towns I’ve helped since 2003 with tools and strategies to expand their array of housing options.
The tragedy: Too few care. They’ve got the house and school system they need and are simply not inclined to consider the needs of others.
Many of them are appalled at the suggestion that they’re racist or exclusionary or don’t care. Woodbridge, like a lot of those suburbs, is filled with people who are highly educated, well-traveled and hardly unaware of the inequity and poverty that plague our state and nation. I’d bet a large majority say they support Black Lives Matter and other social justice efforts. The town, after all, voted 67% to 31% to elect Joe Biden in 2020.
But I don’t think you can consider yourself an advocate for justice — no matter how much you give to charity or letters to the editor you write or demonstrations you attend — unless you vote, and tell your selectmen and zoning commissioners to vote, to allow a range of healthy housing choices in your town so everyone, not just wealthy people, can enter.
That’s the point of this whole thing. If we really want to provide opportunity, really want to provide equity, we can’t simply provide food stamps, day care, Medicaid and other BandAids and think those alone will solve the problem.
If we continually lock low-income families into neighborhoods that have substandard yet-still-expensive housing, with low-resource schools, few services, unsafe streets and little access to transportation and health care — and force parents to spend money that could go to fresh food and enough clothing on, instead, high rents — we will keep failing generation after generation.
If Black lives really matter, the housing and opportunities we strenuously seek for our families are what we must seek for Black families, too.
Which is where Woodbridge finds itself today.
Most vocal residents, faced with a proposal by Open Communities Alliance for approval of a four-unit structure on a single-family parcel, seem to want its zoning commission to deny the request. A denial could spark a lawsuit that could ensnare the town in years of appeals — and earn it an unflattering reputation.
The vocal residents have said, as those in many towns do, that they’re not opposed to affordable housing, it’s just that they want to decide how much and where.
OK.
The problem is that, after most residents in most towns say that, they forget to act, which is why this is so sad. Woodbridge residents could have changed their exclusionary zoning and figured out where to create homes people could afford a decade ago, when I first spoke to a packed crowd on a spring Saturday morning.
But the opponents won that one.
So now, are we to believe the residents’ new stated resolve to plan, zone and create that affordable housing?
I have seen other residents in other towns do it. Woodbridge’s new housing committee is a start, but the members will have to work hard to teach themselves, and the rest of the town, that the myths many believe about affordable homes are just that:
■ They aren’t ugly. We have pictures to prove it.
■ They’re not filled with bad people. We have testimonials to prove it.
■ They’re not covered in graffiti with used syringes on the ground and bullets flying through the air. We have idyllic mixed-income communities to prove it.
■ They don’t lower neighboring property values. We’ve got research to prove it.
■ They don’t bring hordes of school children. We have numbers to prove it.
I don’t blame the housing advocates I know and admire for pushing legislative mandates or filing lawsuits to force towns, which have done nothing, to finally do something. They are impatient, as they should be.
I understand that the residents of Woodbridge have fears that they must conquer. We must help them with information and communication. But if they fail to make real progress, they and the residents of towns like them lose the right to complain about the mandates and court orders that are coming. The time for neglect, to say nothing of outright racism, is long past.