The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Lamont’s big nothing of a housing proposal
There was a telling moment in Gov. Ned Lamont’s budget speech when he talked about one of the most serious issues facing Connecticut.
“Having just climbed out of a fiscal crisis, I don’t want to fall into a housing crisis,” he said.
Maybe he’s been distracted by all his tax-cutting plans, but everyone besides the governor has realized we are already deep into a housing crisis.
A fact sheet put out by the governor’s office itself spells it out: “Nearly one-third of households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, including approximately 80 percent of very and extremely low-income households. … Connecticut has the lowest vacancy rate for all housing units in the entire country.”
Sounds like a crisis.
It’s not just Connecticut. New York and Massachusetts, for example, are realizing how serious their lack of housing has become. What’s different here is what we plan to do about it — not nearly enough.
There were some big numbers thrown around — $600 million, 6,400 units. But even if it all happened, it wouldn’t go far enough. And there are excellent reasons to think it won’t happen.
The governor had until now been mostly absent on housing. He doesn’t want to make suburbs do anything, and his latest proposals look as though they’re putting the entire onus for building new units on the cities. Lamont pointed out that there’s plenty of room to grow in our cities, which is true. But it’s not enough.
For one thing, places like Bridgeport are just as susceptible to the kind of “don’t build here” comments from public officials as anyplace else. A recent proposal to replace a single-family home with a multifamily development there led to complaints about flooding, parking and everything else you’d hear in, say, Fairfield.
(Fairfield, by the way, was last seen crowing about its ability to handle development on its own by citing a plan that will create four — yes, four — units of affordable housing. So that’s what the suburbs are up to.)
Even in a Bridgeport neighborhood like Black Rock, with its walkable main street and easy access to a train station, you see prime lots remaining vacant for years that ought to be home to dozens or hundreds of people. The same anti-development forces hold sway.
In his budget address, Lamont also took on the issue of smaller towns, but more in a pleading sort of way. “I will also urge mayors and first selectmen to develop and act on a plan of their own,” he said Wednesday. “Towns may submit their plans to facilitate housing on their terms. Doing nothing is not an acceptable strategy.”
It’s no coincidence that line in his speech was met with silence in the suburban-dominated legislature. Doing nothing has been the suburban approach all along, and they won’t change unless they’re forced to. The only person with that power was the one delivering the speech, and he is not inclined to use it.
There’s a school of thought that if the right incentives are offered that certain towns will come around to a policy friendly to building homes. Some activists have looked to Bethel, in particular, as a place that gets it — there’s a downtown and a plan for transit-oriented development, along with local officials on board with providing residents, and future residents, options outside the typical suburban framework on how they might want to live.
In a sign of the limits of an incentive-based approach, Bethel just days ago elected a new first selectman who ran in part on revisiting the town’s Bethel Forward Master Plan. It may well be dead, no matter what incentives are offered. And Bethel will join the ranks of other towns that specialize in saying no.
Senate Democrats, for their part, released a so-far underwhelming plan to take on the housing crisis, which was short on specifics but includes plans like redeveloping vacant strip malls and big box stores. That’s fine, but is again incentive based. It does nothing for towns that don’t want incentives, which is most of them.
Lamont’s plans are similar. He wants to provide money for first-time homebuyers, which is welcome, but the issue starts with a lack of homes in general.
Lamont is also offering subsidies for developers. Again, good to hear, but it doesn’t help when so many proposals that would add to the housing stock are rejected, a product of local control over land-use decisions.
All of which points to what’s missing from every major proposal on offer. There’s nothing to put all these good ideas into effect anywhere but the cities, which already have the vast majority of affordable housing and are the only places adding population at all. Nothing on the table is going to do anything to get towns to act on the state’s biggest crisis, which is already here.
The cities can and should add population. But they can’t be home to everyone in the state who needs affordable housing while the mostly wealthy, white suburbs stay exactly as they are. We’ve tried separate but equal before, and it doesn’t work.
This is a year of huge budget surpluses. Everyone involved seems to finally understand the stakes of our housing crisis. Next year is an election year. If we don’t meet the moment now, it’s an enormous wasted opportunity.