River Valley towns to collaborate on affordable housing

ESSEX — More than a dozen towns in the Lower Connecticut River Valley will coordinate to draft state-mandated plans to increase local access to affordable housing, according to several regional planners involved in the effort.

The Lower Connecticut River Valley Council of Governments, known as RiverCOG, began work earlier this summer to develop a regional housing plan, according to executive director Sam Gold. He said the project will also include localized proposals to increase affordable housing in 12 area towns that have yet to develop their own plans under a four-year-old state law requiring them to do so.

The deadline for Connecticut towns to draft local housing plans is next summer, but Gold said only five towns in the RiverCOG region either completed the work or received grants to do so.

Essex, which spearheaded efforts to increase affordable housing in the River Valley when it adopted a town plan in 2019, will also seek to renew that plan as part of RiverCOG’s efforts, bringing the total number of towns involved to 13.

“The policy discussion about whether or not we want to have affordable housing has kind of been taken off the table by the statewide mandate,” Gold said Wednesday. “The question becomes what kind of housing do we want to build in town, and where.”

RiverCOG attempted to address that question, in part, through its ongoing effort to develop a decade long-plan for conservation and development in the region. That plan, submitted Monday to member towns, calls on municipalities to address housing costs by accommodating “a variety of household types and needs.”

While working on that larger plan for the region, Gold and RiverCOG Senior Planner Megan Jouflas said they identified a need for a housing-specific plan that addressed both issues of affordability, as well as the overwhelming proportion of single-family homes in the region’s housing stock.

“We heard a lot when we were doing outreach on [the regional plan] that we are missing options for younger people, older people, and people with differing household types and sizes,” Jouflas said.

Gold said the regional plan will also address ways to increase market-rate housing through the development of new kinds of housing stocks, such as multifamily homes, rental housing and accessory dwelling units, or “granny pods.”

Towns in the Shoreline and Lower Connecticut River Valley generally grew older and more diverse over the last decade, according to recently-released census data. While few of the towns saw population growth, leaders in towns that did said newcomers were attracted to new housing developments that added smaller, cheaper apartments.

For example, Essex added 50 people over the last decade, which First Selectman

Norm Needleman attributed to the development of rental and affordable housing units that were called for in the town’s 2019 affordable housing plan.

John Guszkowski, a consultant planner who helped draft the Essex proposal, said it “went below the radar,” and likely had little to do with the town’s approval of new housing developments in the years since. Instead, he attributed the town’s success in approving development to “aggressive” efforts by members of the planning and zoning commissions, which, he said, led developers to see the small town of about 6,733 as an attractive place to build.

Developing a regional housing plan, Guszkowski said, is unlikely to attract much controversy because individual towns will be given wide discretion to decide what level of change they are comfortable with.

Guszkowski, who also works with the towns of Chester, Deep River, and Clinton, said he is consulting with RiverCOG on the project.

“Gradual change is OK. There’s not a silver bullet for any town, there’s not a single development that’s going to fix their housing need,” Guszkowski said. “A lot of the change has to be in the marketplace.”