Affordable Housing Committee in action

RIDGEFIELD — An Affordable Housing Committee that has been dormant for several years is hoping to get back to work in the coming weeks.

Dave Goldenberg, the committee’s former chairman, held a meeting for prospective members Wednesday and said he plans to schedule another for the last week of June.

The committee, originally formed in 1997, was never officially disbanded, but has been inactive since all its members resigned in 2014, in part because the town did not set aside land on the Schlumberger property for affordable housing development.

Goldenberg, who has been advocating on his own in the meantime, said he has been unsatisfied with the town’s progress since then — specifically with an affordable housing regulation passed by the Planning and Zoning Commission in January — and decided it might be time to reestablish the group.

“That’s when I realized the only way this town is going to move forward to address the issue is through a committee of active and engaged citizens,” he said.

The zoning regulation offers incentives to affordable housing developers if they comply with local zoning rules instead of invoking state statute 8-30g, which only allows towns to deny applications due to health or safety reasons.

Zoning officials had been working on the new rules since a moratorium on 8-30g applications in Ridgefield was granted in 2014. Commission members contended it would spur affordable housing but prevent projects that clashed with surrounding aesthetics or strained town resources.

The first project under the rules was granted for an apartment building on the former Schlumberger proper- ty shortly after the regulations were passed.

But Goldenberg argues that officials should have not only focused on offering an alternative to 8-30g applications, but spurring affordable housing more broadly. He was also disappointed that affordable options were not considered in other recent zoning decisions and developments approved by the commission.

“Every time we add more market-rate units, we reduce the percent of affordable units,” he said.

In a proposal he created about the need for the group, Goldenberg reported that 13 percent of Ridgefield households are “struggling economically” and that 47 percent of renter households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs. About 2.86 percent of Ridgefield’s housing is qualified as deed-restricted affordable, according to a 2016 analysis.

The first goal of the committee will be to update a report and affordable housing action plan that it created in 1999, Goldenberg said. He also hopes the committee can do a better job this time around of making the case for affordable housing.

Part of that will be dispelling certain myths about adding affordable housing, including that it can lower property values or that it overtaxes the town’s resources, both of which he said studies have shown are not the case.

“The biggest misconception is that it is for poor people who have no interest in taking care of themselves, and nothing can be further from the truth,” Goldenberg said. “(Affordable housing is for) teachers, firefighters, people who work in our retail shops, drive our school buses, wait on us in restaurants, paint our houses or cut our hair.”