State can preserve and grow at the same time
A May 17 column by Duo Dickinson titled ‘Tear down’ culture makes it easy to forget about history” is right about the value of history but ultimately misses the forest for the trees. Preserving Connecticut’s past shouldn’t come at the expense of its future, and valuing history shouldn’t choke off dynamism in the present.
Fortunately, it’s entirely possible for Connecticut to simultaneously grow and preserve its history. The issue isn’t some kind of tear-down culture, it’s our ahistorical zoning regime that makes it nearly impossible to build any new places we love.
The core of Dickinson’s argument is that “our buildings simply extend our values” and that “history is a valuable resource, not just in Connecticut, but wherever it exists in every place that harbors us, even in a housing boom.” But there’s a key issue with his main point — Connecticut isn’t in a housing boom. As Camila Vallejo reported in the CT Mirror this January, “fewer building permits for new housing were granted in 2021 than in every year since 2011.” Similarly, a July 2021 article in the Hartford Courant detailed that in 2020 Connecticut towns and cities permitted 5,471 homes, which paled in comparison to the 28,000 issued in the 1980s. Dickinson writes that the state’s issue is “more people looking for a place to live than the existing housing stock can accommodate,” but of course there isn’t a fixed housing stock; we’re simply choosing not to build any. Connecticut isn’t facing a tear-down crisis, it’s experiencing a housing shortage crisis.
One of the key drivers of our housing shortage is our restrictive, ahistorical land-use regime. Indeed, the problem isn’t that Connecticut is tearing down too many cherished buildings, it’s that Connecticut has one of the nation’s largest, hidden historic preservation programs — except it’s for 1970s and ’80s suburbs. Our current zoning paradigm of large minimum lot sizes, onesize-fits-all single-family zoning, and massive parking requirements preserves the aesthetic look of 40 years ago — hardly anyone’s idea of an architectural golden era. For example, my neighborhood in Trumbull began with the 1950s postwar housing boom, and it continued to grow up to the 1980s. But since then it’s remained essentially unchanged, which is completely out of step with Connecticut’s history.
Historically, Connecticut has been a place that embraces the past while constantly looking to grow and prosper in the future. In 1800, the state’s population was 250,000, growing to 900,000 by 1900. Then the state exploded, increasing to 2 million in 1950 and 3.4 million by
2000. Throughout those decades the state adjusted, shifting from an agricultural economy to an industrial one and then to a knowledge economy.
Unfortunately, that growth has almost entirely dried up. Between 2010 and
2020, the state’s population increased only 0.9 percent, the slowest decade increase in the history of Connecticut. This lack of growth is truly out of step with our state’s traditional culture.
Ultimately, I think Dickinson comes close to grasping that so much of what we think of as Connecticut’s “historic charm” is actually about land use. He writes that he and his wife really enjoyed visiting the city of Key West because of its “distinctive sense of place and history” and that they learned so much about the town because “its historical environment is so well preserved.” I completely agree about Key West’s beauty and its cultural character, but he’s missing the most important part — Key West isn’t so charming because it has some ineffable sense of history, but because it was built before the advent of our modern zoning regime and car-centric land use.
On some level we all get what makes our favorite Connecticut towns so wonderful. In April, my wife and I took a day trip to Essex and Chester. We toured the Connecticut River Museum and walked up Main Street, grabbing chocolate and coffee and admiring the gorgeous buildings. Afterwards, we went to Little House Brewing in Chester, walking for a pizza at Otto and reading about the trolley that used to go through its center. Essex and Chester are exactly the types of historic places Dickinson talks about preserving, but again I think he misses the mark. Instead of asking “how can we preserve the few town centers and buildings with any charm,” I think we should be asking an entirely different question: Why haven’t we built any new Chesters or Essexes? Since when did our ambitions as a state become so limited?
Connecticut’s past residents didn’t possess some secret “historic charm” technology that was lost to time; instead, they built as humans have traditionally built, with a mix of retail and residential, with gentle density, and with smaller streets, slow traffic and limited parking. In other words, historic charm is often an umbrella term for human-scaled, walkable environments.
History and growth are sometimes in tension, it’s true, but not in present-day Connecticut. We don’t have a large-scale tear-down problem in our state, we just have a zoning regime that produces car-centric environments and too little housing. And we don’t have a historic preservation problem in the state — we’ve just made it illegal to build any more of the types of places we find most charming. We know how to design spaces and buildings that people love, but we need to look to our past and find inspiration to build a more dynamic future.
We have a zoning regime that produces car-centric environments and too little housing.