Turn Merritt into one big bike lane

What does it take for a zoning story to go national?

There have to be unique circumstances. Affordable housing fights happen all over the place, and everyone has highways. But what if they come together? What if people love a highway so much they use it as an excuse to fight affordable housing?

If that sounds farfetched, welcome to Fairfield County.

The story of an apartment building planned on the upper reaches of Black Rock Turnpike, a street that sums up everything wrong with suburban design, has by now been well told. The town of Fairfield, while far from the worst offender in southwestern Connecticut, lacks affordable options for housing in one of the most expensive places to live in the country, and a developer has proposed building some in the area.

Your feelings about this issue can probably be guessed based on your reaction to the word “developer.” If anyone with that label is automatically the bad guy, you likely think it’s good the plans haven’t gone through as envisioned. If, on the other hand, you realize that basically everything that gets built anywhere happens because a developer is involved in some fashion, you might have room for a more nuanced take.

At any rate, the developer in this case is wellknown and has done good work around the area. This is not some cartoon villain. The proposal in question would have been a sixstory, 120-unit apartment building, with 36 of those units qualifying as affordable.

Six stories is not small, but it’s not exactly a skyscraper, either. The ideal place for housing of this type would be right next to a train stop, but next to a highway is hardly the worst place. Most people will likely be driving for nearly every trip they take, anyway.

But the headline-grabbing objection to this proposal was not the affordable aspect — it’s what the site abuts. The head of the Merritt Parkway Conservancy pronounced the six-story plan to be “Godawful” and an “intrusion” because it would be visible from the highway.

“There is nothing that you can say positively about this contributing to the experience of the Merritt Parkway,” Wes Haynes, the conservancy’s executive director, said. It would add to the experience of more people being able to live in an actual apartment, but that didn’t factor in.

Fairfield officials, unfortunately, agreed, saying the building could be approved only if it was two stories shorter. The conservancy then celebrated its “victory” online, prompting commentary from around the country wondering how it’s possible that anyone could prioritize a highway over a place to live. Is this what Connecticut is about? Unfortunately, yes, it is. This stance doesn’t even have the benefit of consistency, since many buildings are visible from the Merritt. It runs through a number of communities, including Norwalk, which features a nine-story office building called, of all things, Merritt View. For those keeping score, nine is greater than six. Also, as the name implies, the building is clearly visible from the road. Somehow the world continues to spin.

The bad guy here is not the developer. The bad guy is the Merritt Parkway Conservancy and anyone who sided with its distorted vision. The Merritt Parkway is fine, as highways go, but cannot honestly be described as a public space. It’s a means of conveyance. It’s how you get from one place to another. That they have the

The Merritt Parkway is fine, as highways go, but cannot honestly be described as a public space. It’s a means of conveyance. It’s how you get from one place to another. That they have the temerity to refer to the Merritt as an environmental asset at a time when automobiles’ contribution to climate change is common knowledge tells you all you need to know.

temerity to refer to the Merritt as an environmental asset at a time when automobiles’ contribution to climate change is common knowledge tells you all you need to know.

If the Merritt Parkway turned into I-95, would the region suffer? It’s debatable. Yes, we’d lose a nice road, but New England is packed with nice roads. Anyone in the mood for an old-school Sunday drive would still have an endless array of options.

On the other hand, we need housing, especially that people other than hedge-fund managers can afford to live in.

How do you properly express disgust with a highway? You can’t propose paving it over — it’s already pavement. Turn it into a multi-use trail? That’s an idea, especially since the conservancy has long opposed building such an amenity next to the highway on the grounds that it would, somehow, detract from the experience of sitting in endless traffic (“major construction of unattractive structures,” is how they put it — structures like bridges and tunnels; simply horrifying).

So maybe that’s the answer. Turn the Merritt into one big bike lane, lined with multistory apartment buildings. Maybe run a rail line down the median. Turn the highway into a legitimate asset for the region. And maybe then we could find something useful for members of the conservancy to do with their time.