After setback, leaders vow to revive housing reform
HARTFORD — A controversial bill that would make it easier to file lawsuits against towns if they didn’t support new affordable housing, has quietly died amid a Republican threat to filibuster the issue in a crucial legislative committee.
The bill was a centerpiece of desegregation, zoning and economic development policy for advocates and liberal Democrats who saw 2021 as a chance to make progress in a decadesold battle. Hopes for a clean path to voted in the House and Senate ended late Monday.
But House Majority Leader Jason Rojas said Tuesday that it’s a minor setback in one of his chief goals for the legislative session: promoting affordable housing units throughout the state to foster economic growth.
Supporters want the wide-ranging bill, which has changed significantly in recent weeks, to advance racial and economic integration in some of Connecticut’s overwhelmingly white, upscale towns. Opponents, many in those towns, including loud opposition in Greenwich, say the bill would remove local control over the “character” of their communities, especially in the town centers, where rules could change.
State Rep. Steve Stafstrom, DBridgeport, co-chairman of the legislative Judiciary Committee, let the bill expire without debate on Monday, amid a promise from minority GOP lawmakers that hours of time would be eaten up in discussing the bill, resulting in other bills expiring without votes.
Monday was the deadline for the committee to act on legislation referred from other General Assembly committees, so minority Republicans had some degree of power over the agenda. “For whatever reason the Republicans decided to draw a line in the sand on this bill,” Stafstrom said outside the House chamber Tuesday afternoon.
“They said they were not interested in allowing it to go to a vote before the committee. I know that there are other vehicles in the building to discuss zoning reform and I certainly hope that at the right time, the House is going to have a chance to debate those issues,” Stafstrom said.
Rojas, D-East Hartford, in an interview on the House floor, vowed to make sure the full scope of the housing reform bill is revived in a variety of related bills called “vehicles” in legislative parlance. He has several parliamentary tactics and remedies in the House, where Democrats hold a
97-54 majority.
“I think we engage people in a conversation to see what’s possible,” Rojas said. “Unfortunately the Republicans chose to filibuster a bill in committee, which says to me that despite a lot of the rhetoric on their side about wanting to work on these issues, their public presentations about it are far different than what they suggest about finding compromise around housing issues.”
Stafstrom and Rojas acknowledged that the section about legal remedies likely needed redrafting, but he noted that courts already have to deal with an affordable housing appeals law. Erin Boggs, a housing advocate who helped draft the legislation, said Tuesday that the legal remedies are needed in whatever legislation can emerge from the General Assembly before its adjournment at midnight, June 9.
Under the proposal, modeled after a New Jersey law, the state would create an estimate of how much affordable housing is needed, and it would then be allocated by region. Towns with higher per-capita median incomes and grand lists, but lower percentages of multifamily housing and lower poverty rates, would be asked to build more units of affordable housing.
Municipalities with poverty rates of
20 percent or greater would be excluded from the requirements. Towns would be required to develop plans to reach their share of affordable housing in 10 years. They could choose to ask a court to certify their plans, or they could file their plan with the state, knowing it could be challenged.
“It’s not as if this would be a completely new construct,” Rojas said. “I understand the concern that people have about having even more litigation around housing issues. It’s a fair concern.”
State Rep. Craig Fishbein, R-Walllingford, ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said that the section of the bill about legal challenges was not artfully drafted.
“We had a lot of amendments ready to go,” Fishbein said outside the House chamber on Tuesday, recalling the Monday committee meeting. “It was quite clear to me it wasn’t written by somebody who had the acumen of a lawyer.” He said another major problem was a section that would allow adjoining municipalities to sue over housing issues.
“We were certainly willing to do what we had to do,” Fishbein said.
Rojas said Republicans are committed to block housing reforms. “Not just affordability of housing for lowincome people but housing costs, period, for middle-class individuals as well.”
He added, “The high cost of living here, a lot of it is the high cost of housing and unfortunately, they don’t want to do anything about it. It would be helpful if they put ideas on the table but we didn’t even get that from them.”
House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, said affordable housing statutes often have the opposite of their intended effect, failing to lower costs for residents.
“It’s really a lawyer’s dream,” Candelora said. “I think there were concerns about the way that bill was written. It was perpetuating a broken policy. That’s what Republicans have been concerned with.”
Candelora recalled that the House has passed bipartisan proposals on housing, only to see legislation die in the Senate. He said the focus should be on actually creating affordable units, but under current law, developers are allowed to manipulate it to get what they want in towns or cities.
Boggs, founder and executive director of Open Communities Alliance, which promotes equitable access to housing across Connecticut, said supporters hoped for bipartisan backing.
“This bill holds appeal across differing geographies of Connecticut and across party lines because it really strikes that balance between local control and the need to make some fundamental changes to the way we do zoning, to provide the affordable housing that the state needs,” Boggs said Tuesday.
Boggs said the enforcement provision is “absolutely required” to make the bill “meaningful.” Some legislators have chosen to focus on that piece of the bill rather than the crux of what it sets out to do, which is to “set up a structure for towns to contribute to the state’s affordable housing needs while maintaining local zoning control.”