Landlords, tenants debate crisis
Cap rent or make it easier to evict? Housing shortage, rising expenses add to growing issue
Connecticut officials, property owners, tenants and nonprofits agree that the state is in the midst of a housing crisis that is driving expenses, evictions and homelessness. But the causes — and how to solve it — are still being disputed.
Michael Santoro, the director of policy, research and housing support for the Connecticut Department of Housing, didn’t mince words as he testified before the Connecticut General Assembly’s Housing Committee last week.
“We, right now, have the lowest amount of available housing stock that we have had in my 35 years working for the state of Connecticut,” Santoro said. “We have a shortage — a lack of enough rental units, and we have a lack of ownership units. It is widespread, across the board and in all income bands.”
The DOH projected that Connecticut is short 86,000 affordable housing units for very-low income households, according to a 2021 study from the department — but the need doesn’t stop there.
The lack of stock has crept into all ZIP codes and tax brackets, resulting in 50% of Connecticut renters and 28% of homeowners receiving the DOH label of “cost-burdened,” a term applied to households who spend 30% or more of their income on housing.
Santoro explained that Connecticut’s projected population decline will not be enough to solve the problem.
“The fact that population isn’t growing doesn’t mean that the number of households in our state doesn’t continue to grow as people get older, they age into setting up their own households,” Santoro said. “We see that there are a lot of adults living with other adults. That is, they do not have a current ability to create their own household due to, in part, a lack of housing stock.”
Evictions are also on the rise. Landlords filed 19,106 evictions against Connecticut renters in
2019, according to data from the Connecticut Fair Housing Center. In 2022, eviction filings rose to 22,749 — a more than 19% increase.
Tenant advocates argue that exorbitant rent increases and limited housing availability have pushed renters into living situations they cannot afford or even onto the street.
Across Connecticut, the fair market rent for a one-bedroom apartment ranges from $1,034 to $2,127. Before the pandemic, those same units cost between $813 to $1,517. Over this period from 2019 to 2023, fair market rent values in Hartford rose an average of 27%.
Landlords argue that the increases are justified.
John Sousa, the president of the Connecticut Coalition of Property Owners, said that the landlords have equally struggled over the past two years and barriers to success for medium-to-small property owners continue to rise.
“I know many of our members just decided to pack it in and sell. And unfortunately, they just got beat up too bad,” Sousa said. “It’s too expensive to operate property. [If ] you can’t collect the rents you want to collect to pay the expenses, then at some point, you’re going to give up.”
Sousa said that operating costs in almost every aspect of his property from taxes to electricity, gas, construction materials, labor, employee wages and insurance. He said that in one building, the property tax went up nearly 60% in one year.
“[My] one-bedroom apartments approximately used to cost $205 a month just for the [Hartford] city taxes. And after the increase, they’re up to about $275-85. So roughly $65 a month per unit increase,” Sousa said. “Everybody wants affordable housing, but that building is 31 units, [and] it’s literally almost $100,000 a year for taxes.”
These costs, coupled with difficult experiences raising rents and filing evictions have weeded out mom-and-pop landlords.
“I make a living at it and I’m getting tired. I’ve been doing it for 34 years and I want to keep doing it. I want to expand my business, but it’s just not worth it. I’d rather go find someplace else to do something else at this point. But if somebody asked me, honestly, if [I] want to sell everything at a good price, I probably would,” Sousa said. “The more bureaucracy [needed] to do anything, the less likely people are going to do it. It’s just the way of the world, it’s the way business is too.”
For those that are not in a position to sell, Robert Decosmo, the manager of the Connecticut Property Owners Alliance, fears that there will be a “wave” of property foreclosures.
Decosmo said that pandemic-era eviction moratoriums are to blame for the current housing shortage. He believes that “the normal market conditions will resolve itself sooner as opposed to later.”
“A lot of the tenants, whether they lost their jobs or not, just didn’t pay rent. So the mom-andpop landlords who supplied the backbone of the affordable housing in this country were starving. They were going through personal savings, they went through credit lines, and they had it. They got to the end of their financial resources and they began to sell their properties off,” Decosmo said.
As the properties went up for sale, he said, out-of-state companies and investors snatched up the available real estate.
“The New York absentee investors looked at [the properties] as bargain rates because a three-family [home] in New York is 800,000. And they came to New Britain, which I think [had] the baseline starting around 225,000, [and] they bid those property values up to $350- $400,000,” Decosmo said. “Unfortunately, they don’t understand the dynamics of our rental market. And they thought, ‘What you can get in New York for rent, you can get in Connecticut.’ And in many of these markets, you simply can’t do that. It’s impossible to get those kinds of numbers.”
Decosmo said that legislators should reassess inspection protocols and speed up the evictions process to reduce the risk for landlords. He fears that current tenant-centered policy proposals will have a “devastating impact” on small-time landlords.
But advocates for renters’ rights disagree, arguing in favor of rent caps and expanding municipal fair rent commissions and eviction protections to benefit tenants.
At least three bills in the state legislature propose limiting how much landlords can raise rents in a single year. One would prohibit “rent increases that exceed 4% plus any increase in the regional consumer price index on an annual basis.” The second would cap rent increases at 2.5%. The third bill, scheduled for a public hearing, would allow the state Housing Commissioner to calculate the maximum rent increase on an annual basis.
Advocates, like the Cap the Rent CT coalition, say that increased limits protect tenants from predatory landlords and housing loss.
“Renters deserve stability, safety, and the chance to put down roots. We deserve the kind of predictability homeowners enjoy when they have a mortgage,” the campaign states. “Landlords shouldn’t have the power to uproot our lives. Yet current Connecticut law puts no limits on how much landlords can raise rents. … Rent stabilization works. It has an immediate impact on skyrocketing housing costs, helping to ensure we all have an affordable place to call home.”
Others see the power of fair rent commissions as another solution to curb soaring housing costs. Currently, municipalities with a population of 25,000 or more are required to have commissions, but lawmakers are looking to expand the mandate to towns of 10,000 or more.
The move has been criticized by landlords, and municipality representatives who say the mandate financially burdens small towns and leaves property owners in months-long battles without resolution.
“There are about 120,000 renter households that pay more than half of their income on rent,” Sean Ghio, the policy director of the Partnership for Strong Communities, said.
Ghio believes municipal populations should not impact a tenant’s right to challenge rent. He is an advocate for fair rent commissions in every town.
“Fair rent commissions respond to individual tenant complaints and they have the power to reduce excessive rent increases and divisions. In an environment like Connecticut where we have very old homes, decisions of a fair rent commission can reinforce code enforcement orders and delay rent increases until repairs are made. These commissions often are tenants’ only major challenge to excessive rent,” Ghio said.
Housing as a human right
Additional lawmakers and activists feel that the state should go even further to establish “A Right To Housing,” as outlined in S.B. 909.
If passed, the bill would reinvigorate and reprioritize state funding, policies, and programs that focus on housing safety, affordability, protection from loss, and rehousing assistance.
Opponents fear that a right to housing would encroach on landlord property rights. But advocates say that it’s time for the state to shift towards homelessness prevention instead of placing a Band-aid on the crisis.
In an interview with the Courant before the start of the legislative session, State Sen. Saud Anwar, a longtime advocate of the right to housing, explained that such a declaration would not legally mandate that Connecticut provide housing for all residents. Instead, it creates a policy-based mindset focused on shaping a future where everyone has a place to call home.
“Unless we are able to have a strategy to invest and identify partnerships with investors and developers to create enough affordable homes spread throughout the different towns of our state, we will never be able to catch up,” Anwar said. “We should be able to say that housing is a human right… This is a moral question for us: Are we going to do it? Or are we just gonna watch individuals suffer in our society?”
Tenaya Taylor, the executive director of the Nonprofit Accountability Group, testified in support of the right to housing before the Housing Committee.
“Most landlords who are against bills like 909 and increased tenants’ rights are not mom-andpop landlords,” Taylor said. “They’re very large, profitable landlords who don’t want to see tenants win and progress. Landlords are just a small majority of people compared to all the people who rent or are just regular homeowners. We give a lot of power to this population of very small people”
Taylor shared the impact of personally experiencing homelessness as a child and an adult. Taylor said that the state must address actual affordability to prevent evictions.
“[For the] general population [of ] downtown Hartford, they call $1200 a month affordable, but it’s affordable to who? Not a single mother with three kids who, you know, is taking the bus to work,” Taylor said. “Housing just needs to be made more available. And when we say affordability we should be more specific and talk about relativity to affordability.”