New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
First step for housing reform is stop saying no to everything
When I moved to San Francisco shortly after college, I shared a room with a stranger and a bathroom with an entire floor. There was no kitchen, though there were two meals a day served in the basement. Residents paid by the week, and the neighborhood was known as dicey, at best.
It wasn't quite as bad as it sounds. Many residents were students at a nearby arts college that lacked accommodations, though there were plenty of lifers, too. It worked for people who weren't all that picky and didn't have a lot of money, but wanted to live in the heart of the city.
Like today, jobs were plentiful. I had multiple offers before I even left the East Coast. Accommodations, on the other hand, were scarce unless you were rich, and I wasn't.
The solution I found was only tenable as a stopgap, but that was what I needed. I lived there a few months (which was plenty) and tried and failed to rent many apartments in that time before I met a friend of a coworker who needed someone to move in immediately. It worked out fine from there.
San Francisco had a notoriously tight housing market — the worst in the nation, by some measures — and it's only gotten worse since then. The reason is simple enough — many people want to live there and there aren't enough homes to accommodate them.
This isn't an unsolvable problem. But like everywhere else in this country with a housing crisis, solutions are held up by people who already live there and don't want anything to change. They are happy pulling up the ladder behind them.
Connecticut doesn't have the obvious appeal of San Francisco or New York City, but the numbers show our crisis in housing is just as severe. Prices are out of reach, vacancy rates are extremely low and entry into the market is circumscribed for too many people.
The kind of place I lived when I moved to San Francisco doesn't exist here (and wouldn't appeal to most people even if it did). But it's the kind of thing that should be part of the solution. Not everything needs to work for everyone. But if we're going to be more welcoming — and it's in all our interests that we do so — there are many facets that we need to consider.
Arguments about housing, however, have narrowed to the point that all sides agree the proposed solutions don't come close to solving the problem. It's a longterm crisis that requires a wide range of answers, few of which are even under discussion.
This is what happens when decisionmakers reflexively say no to anything that's not single-family housing on large lots, which predominates across the majority of Connecticut, including in the highest-demand communities. Towns too often simply say no, leaving advocates for more homes to turn to the courts and developers to make use of the much-maligned 8-30g.
Opponents argue that 8-30g hasn't solved the affordable housing crisis, and on that they're right. Getting rid of the law won't help anything, either. This is like when conservatives got mad about Obamacare by saying it didn't solve all the problems of American health care. That's true enough, but it has done some good, and there was never a viable alternative plan, which meant opponents were arguing in favor of doing nothing.
That's not a legitimate answer. Neither is leaving matters up to the towns themselves, a path that has led us to the crisis we face today.
This is why opponents of housing reforms are losing the arguments. They can't realistically argue that things are fine as is, not when business groups say their top priority is to grow the state population and that affordability is a primary obstacle to that goal. Nor can they argue that existing solutions are sufficient when those solutions have had years to prove effective, and yet have failed.
They argue 8-30g wouldn't help the kinds of people often cited to be in need of affordable housing, such as police officers and teachers. Yet their solution is to do less. If there's been anything in the mold of a workable solution offered from anti-reform groups, they have yet to publicize it. Always the answer is to rely on local solutions, which we know from experience are lacking.
Connecticut is a small state, and it is densely packed. Still, there is room for more and better development, and it could happen in ways that many people wouldn't notice. A lot could be done in downtowns, by transit stations, along commercial strips and in industrial zones or office parks. There is room to grow.
There could be opportunities available at all income levels, in every town. That would include people just out of college who aren't looking for anything fancy but just need a place close to their jobs while they hold out for something better. I was lucky once to have that.
The first step is to stop saying no to everything.