How to solve a problem like New Canaan
Share some sympathy this holiday season for public officials in New Canaan. They may be discovering, at long last, that their town does not exist on an island, it is part of a wider community, and they cannot put up walls against the outside world.
That doesn’t mean the town is happy about it.
The issue, as in so many of Connecticut’s toniest suburbs, is housing. Connecticut has an across-the-board shortage of places to live, felt most acutely by people of modest incomes. Towns like New Canaan — population roughly 20,000, median income north of $200,000 a year — offer the least of all. If you’re outside the top 1 percent, good luck moving in.
For a good number of town residents, and seemingly the run of public officials, that’s no problem. The prevailing view is, if you can’t afford it, live someplace else.
The laws of the state of Connecticut offer a different view. New Canaan, much to its leaders’ dismay, is subject to such laws.
What’s different about the current controversy is how few of the typical objections apply. This isn’t an example of an outsider swooping in to make money — the developer, Arnold Karp, is impeccably credentialed and a longstanding pillar of the community. It’s not a money-making scheme, since opponents have pointed out that a development without the affordable component could be more lucrative.
What the contest is doing is exposing the lengths to which towns will go to keep out what they don’t want, even if by law it should be allowed. In New Canaan’s case, the strategy has been to run out the clock and try to outspend the applicants.
A lack of meaningful enforcement from the state means that can be a winning strategy. That needs to change.
Housing will again be a major topic in the next session of the General Assembly. Legislators can and should pass sweeping changes to allow more homes to be built in more places (see, for instance, the Fair Share housing proposal that came up last year and deserves a serious look again). But even short of that, there are laws that could make the housing application process in places like New Canaan fairer to everyone.
For starters, set a time limit. There’s no reason a proposal like the one recently turned down on Weed Street in New Canaan should last more than a year. Barring something unforeseen, the state could set a two- to threemonth limit on consideration of such plans.
Then, make them pay. If a town denies a housing plan that is successfully appealed using 830g, the municipality should be on the hook for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in consultants and other fees racked up in the approvals process. Under current circumstances, towns have every incentive to stretch out the process and demand evermore-excruciating details about everything from stormwater drainage to traffic signaling.
Those are important issues, but the experts required to testify on them cost money, which not every developer is able to endlessly spend. It shouldn’t be in the toolkit of communities to stretch out the process and price out interested parties. The state can and should put municipalities on the hook for the cost of all those experts in cases they lose.
The 8-30g law comes under intense criticism in places like New Canaan, but it’s no guarantee of success. All it does is require that towns that lack affordable housing have a good reason for denying it. Made-up concerns about the environment aren’t going to work — in nearly every case, density is a huge environmental win, as opposed to the sprawl Connecticut typically favors.
Such is the case on Weed Street, a short walk from downtown New Canaan and its train station. This is a place where people who work at local businesses might afford to live. It could appeal to divorced parents who want to stay close to their kids, or to grandparents. There’s good reason to think children who grew up in town would like an option to stay in the community.
The Weed Street proposal has a component of affordable housing, though most would be market rate. It is not low-income housing. Connecticut needs a lot of that, too, but it’s not what’s on the table, despite the demonization campaign opponents have waged against it.
The drama about Weed Street is simple. It’s New Canaan, among many towns like it, trying to wall itself off from the world. New Canaan likes to believe it’s an island. It doesn’t have, say, a hospital, or a courthouse, a major power plant or much of anything else that underpins society and allows it to function, but its residents are happy to pretend none of that matters.
At the same time, New Canaan’s denial of the Weed Street plan repeatedly references housing options available in nearby Norwalk and Stamford, as if would-be residents would be better off somewhere else. The legal bearing on the question at hand is nonexistent.
The Weed Street proposal will be appealed on 8-30g grounds, and the developer would appear to have a good chance of winning. Many public officials hate it, but 8-30g is not a loophole or a backdoor. It’s a law.
Unfortunately for New Canaan, the law applies there, too.