New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Now’s the time to change archaic zoning laws
To see why so many conversations about race get sidelined, look no further than discussions around Senate Bill 1024, “An Act Concerning Zoning Authority, Certain Design Guidelines, Qualifications of Zoning Enforcement Officers and Certain Sewage Disposal Systems.”
Unwieldy title aside, the bill, now being considered in the waning days of Connecticut’s legislative session, is a giant step toward updating the state’s archaic zoning laws. Over the years, those laws – which are mostly unique to every burg -- have been as effective as moats in keeping a certain “character” about our towns.
And what means “character?”
Mostly, the word is a stand-in for racist words we don’t use in polite company but that are nevertheless steeped in tradition and rigid as a deacon’s hairstyle.
An online public hearing in March stretched for an entire day, and while nearly three-quarters of the people spoke in favor of the bill, the opposition voiced concerns that covered three main areas. Namely, they worried that uniformity in our zoning laws and a focus on muchneeded affordable housing in the state amounts to state overreach, and they worried that changing the way we zone will lower our property values, and increase crime, wink, wink.
Those tropes that surround affordable housing have been long-since discounted in the most studied affordable housing case in the country in Mount Laurel, N.J. There, after a contentious battle over affordable housing ended with said housing being built, anyway, traffic didn’t increase. Crime stayed the same. And property values didn’t drop.
Meanwhile, Connecticut is stalled. Between 2010 and 2020, Connecticut had the fourth lowest population growth in the nation — and the lowest in the Northeast — according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Countless teachers and firefighters cannot afford to live in the towns in which they serve. You can find affordable housing in, say, Bridgeport, but good luck in places such as Goshen or Killingworth. According to state Department of Housing 2020 figures, Goshen’s residential stock includes just 0.42% affordable housing, while Killingworth includes just 0.89%.
Last year, as the pandemic stripped back everything, nearly 70 organizations joined under the banner of Desegregate CT to focus on creating more housing options throughout the state, among other goals. Members of the group, which was founded by Sara C. Bronin, came from sectors that don’t always sit on the same side of the table to lobby for SB 1024. Bronin is a muchpublished attorney and an architect, whose husband is Hartford’s mayor, Luke Bronin.
This legislation could be
the most significant step forward for housing in the state, ever.
We can continue to do things the way we’ve always done, with predictable results. Or we can try something a little bolder and a whole lot holier, and that may start with the white majority abandoning their go-to defensive crouch.
A few months after Desegregate CT organized, the East Haddam planning and zoning commission met to discuss comments made by Theresa Govert, a town selectwoman who at an earlier event had the temerity to talk about the connection between zoning and segregation.
In her remarks, Govert mentioned no particular P&Z, but in her town, the meeting erupted, wrote Colleen Shaddox, in a piece for CT Mirror, in bleated pleas (my words) that East Haddam is not racist, and how dare any one suggest otherwise. From the video of the meeting, one commissioner said he’d never seen a single, solitary word in the town zoning laws that excludes any one — no matter their race — from living in East Haddam. “I know everyone is searching for racism behind every tree in town,” said another longtime commissioner. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Boom. There it is. The deeper conversation gets sidelined while we must stop to attend to hurt feelings. Yet our zoning laws are the blueprint for our towns, and they have served — up to now — as codified segregation — racial and economic — that leaves so many of our villages, towns and neighborhoods lily-white.
On a recent Saturday, Shaddox was among 100 or so people standing outside Deep River’s historic town hall at a rally organized by Desegregate CT. The crowd was mostly white, which reflects the demographics of the old river town. They hoisted signs that said things like “Black Kids Matter” and “Housing justice for all.” Shaddox brought her two children, and they intended to have a Mother’s Day picnic later.
Also in the crowd was Ann Faust, executive director of the Coalition on Housing + Homelessness, which works to end homelessness in Middlesex County, Wallingford, and Meriden. Faust, who has worked for decades to increase the state’s housing options, said she was cautiously optimistic.
The crowd listened to the likes of Bronin; Rep. Christine Palm, D-Chester; Evonne Klein, the former state housing commissioner and current interim CEO of Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness, and Jah-Marley Wright, a Colchester activist/rapper. They all spoke about the need to meet the state’s crying need for inclusivity.
And it really is a crying need. In Centerbrook, just down the road from the rally, 170 people applied for a spot in a 17-unit mixed income development, The Lofts at Spencer’s Corner, said Jim Crawford, of HOPE Partnership, the non-profit organization responsible for the development. One hundred people remain on the waiting list. Another development, scheduled for completion in 2022, is in the works in Madison. It can’t open soon enough.