A memo to Lamont on the housing crisis
Dear Governor, The holidays are past (I hope you had a great Christmas!) and Connecticut is about to enter a promising New Year with a dangerous old problem — a housing crisis inflamed by unaffordable prices, increasing homelessness and the lowest rental vacancy rate in the nation — and there is only one person who can solve it: You. You won a second term by a comfortable margin, and you have even more comfortable majorities in the House and Senate. You can fix the problem if you want to. But to date, you haven’t indicated much interest. You spent your first term providing significantly less for housing creation than your predecessor, and you hardly broached the issue then, or during the latest campaign.
Lately, you’ve alluded to the central issue of the crisis: a stultifying shortage of supply. And it’s true: there are many actions needed to solve the crisis, but they all boil down to building many more homes in many more towns.
To date, though, you’ve insisted those towns — their residents and officials — need to lead the way.
But you’re wrong. You do.
Why? Because the opposition to housing creation in those towns is strong, the inertia to avoid the problem is stronger, and my many wonderful colleagues in housing creation — smart, dedicated, hard-working advocates, developers, government experts and financiers — are seldom on the same page, often married to ideas that conflict or barely coincide. Someone needs to lead — and that would be you.
I’ve watched you for four years. The same good instincts that helped you lead us out of the pandemic’s darkest days and the depths of an enormous state debt hole should be enough to help you take four vital steps toward a solution:
Please get more familiar with the problem and its solutions.
Homelessness is on the rise. Meanwhile, half the state’s renters and a third of its homeowners spend more than 30% of their income on housing. That’s bad for them, bad for merchants and bad for state revenues. Every dime they spend on housing can’t be spent on taxable items. The huge run-up in home prices forced would-be buyers into the rental market, driving up demand and rental prices. Those with lower incomes have been driven into homelessness or are skipping meals and health care to afford the rent. Most municipalities with low- and moderate-income households tend to have fewer services and overburdened schools. Creating density and, thus, affordability in those towns will expand work opportunities and spark school success. You’ll spend less on social service supports.
And if you can get homes built near transit, those households will spend less on housing and transportation, leaving them more for food, clothing, rent, health care and other necessities.
Please understand that timing is everything. Two million Millennials live in New York City, most of them in or entering marrying-homebuying-childbearing years. Many can’t afford to stay in the city but want to preserve careers they’ve started there. So, they can choose
Long Island, Westchester, northern New Jersey or Connecticut. If we have affordable homes for them, they’ll come here, providing more taxpayers so you can lower taxes. But if not, they’ll go elsewhere. There’s nothing wrong with Connecticut — from taxpayers to needed workers — that 50,000 new households wouldn’t cure.
Please ask the business community to kick in.
Manufacturers, insurance companies, bio/ health employers and “captive industries” — the universities, hospitals, utilities and banks that can’t move — should help because they have the most to gain. They need a labor pool. You’ll attract out-of-state workers with lower housing expenses so businesses won’t have to raise wages. And you may also be able to lower business taxes. There is a long history of businesses across the nation providing housing. In 2023, they can help once more, providing land, subsidy or financing.
Please shape well-conceived municipal incentives.
Some of my colleagues want to require every municipality to provide its “fair share” of homes to meet the huge need. And they’re right, that’s what would be fair. Currently, about 30 cities and towns provide most of the homes working-class households can afford. But our history of exclusion by wealthier towns isn’t a Democrat-Republican issue, it’s an
urban suburban issue. So, with a fair-share plan unlikely to pass, move on.
You’re flush with cash, so offer incentives — capital for construction, funding for area improvements, cash to spark zoning reform, technical assistance to help with planning, new grant programs for towns that create housing.
Beyond that, get your commissioners of Housing, Public Health and Energy and Environmental Protection together to clear away wastewater regulations’ statutory, turf and funding barriers that could, in turn, allow more housing to be built with effective new technology in the many locations where sewers don’t exist.
Governor, taxes are too high in Connecticut. More housing can solve that problem and many others.
Additional supply will lower prices, provide homes for the essential workers we all said we cared about, reduce homelessness, provide more work and educational opportunities in more towns for workers and their families, attract more taxpayers to the state and, in turn, bring in more revenue so those tax rates can be lowered.
It’s a win-win-win-win. But we need a leader. So, governor, please pick up the ball and run with it. The clock is ticking.