City: ‘No’ to apartments in one-family homes
DANBURY — City leaders have said “no” to a new state law aimed at increasing affordable housing options by giving single-family homes the right to have an accessory apartment.
The reason: Danbury has a plan in development to increase affordable housing and doesn’t need Connecticut to dictate terms, the city’s top planner said during a public hearing this week.
“We are in the best position to do that ourselves, without the state telling us all the details associated with it,” Planning Director Sharon Calitro said before the Zoning Commission voted unanimously to opt out of the state requirement. “My staff has been working with the city’s affordable housing plan committee … about ways to increase housing opportunities across the board for all income ranges — but affordable units in particular.”
City leaders said opting out of the state requirement should not be seen as a knee-jerk appeal to home rule in response to another state mandate, but rather as a way to preserve Danbury’s ability to write “regulations based on local demographics, housing conditions, and economic circumstances.”
City Council member Paul Rotello, who sits on the Affordable Housing Commission, told the Zoning Commission that Danbury was above the state requirement that at least 10 percent of housing stock be affordable.
“If a lack of diversity either racial or economic is a problem, this is not a particular problem that Danbury has vis-à-vis the towns it is surrounded by,” Rotello said. “We are the most diverse city in Connecticut and our economic level for affordable housing is higher than the state minimum.”
Rotello said the city’s percentage of affordable housing was 12 percent.
“It is sometimes difficult to write state legislation that accepts those communities that are already behaving well and at the same time putting the onus on communities that may not be. But that is where we find ourselves in Danbury,” said Rotello. “Danbury on its own has come up with solutions that are more practical — and by that I mean more
successful — than other communities in Connecticut that the state language is singling out.”
At the same time, Danbury is developing a statemandated affordable housing plan. The plan will “go out to the public for comment with a month or so,” and “will be adopted before June of this year,” Calitro said.
“Up until 2015, we did have an accessory apartment provision in the zoning regulations but there were some abuses to that by a local property owner and the Zoning Commission at that point decided to delete the provision for accessory apartments,” Calitro said. “There’s been discussion about a strategy to implement or bring back an accessory apartment regulation.”
Rotello said it would be a mistake to let the state “dictate a one-size-fits-all program.”
“The state language is indicative of a long-term trend to eliminate as much as possible either racial or economic townwide redlining,” Rotello said before the Zoning Commission’s unanimous vote to opt out. “Other communities in Connecticut should be looking to us to see how to avoid the pitfalls that this particular language … in the state petition is trying to solve.”