An important story was published recently by reporters Jacqueline Rabe Thomas and Alex Putterman in CT Insider about the housing that Connecticut is falling short on building. The evidence they present of a housing shortfall flies in the face of consistently sunny talk from the governor and his administration, and should help guide legislative strategy this year in the General Assembly.

The upshot is that whatever Connecticut is doing in regards to public spending on affordable housing, the state is held back by factors that don’t relate to funding.

Last week, CT 169 Strong, the anti-everything group from Fairfield County, issued another round of misinformation about zoning reform efforts in Connecticut. Their latest message to supporters contains a lot of words, certainly. Hardly any of them make sense. But since the group represents a worldview that holds plenty of sway in Connecticut, it’s important to push back.

Let’s start with the headline on its recent Facebook post, which reads: “Is Connecticut poised to have the largest tax increase due to a new housing policy that the legislature may pass?” Best of luck to anyone trying to diagram that sentence. The idea seems to be to scare people into thinking taxes will inevitably rise with zoning reform, which is not true. But mostly it’s just badly written and confusing.

Why Fair Housing Still Hasn’t Reached Fairfield County

April is Fair Housing Month — a time to honor the promise of the Fair Housing Act and reflect on how far we’ve come. But in Connecticut, one of the wealthiest and most racially segregated states in the country, it's also a time to be honest about how far we still have to go.

The truth is, our state’s housing crisis isn’t just about affordability. It’s about exclusion. And, if you dig into the history, that exclusion was by design. For some, that effort to exclude continues to this day.

Decades of local zoning laws — minimum lot sizes, bans on multifamily housing, and other so-called “preservation” policies — have kept many of our wealthiest towns overwhelmingly white and affluent, while pushing low-income residents and families of color into under-resourced cities. In 2020, 77% of Connecticut’s Black residents still lived in just 15 of our 169 towns. The racial geography of our state looks eerily similar to the 1960s. That’s not an accident. That’s policy.

Here’s an argument on housing and homelessness that comes up all the time and has no connection to reality. It goes something like this: “When advocates say we lack 100,000 units of affordable housing, that doesn’t make sense because there are only a few thousand homeless people in the state.”

This is an actual claim put forth by people claiming to care about public policy. To cite one example, it came up in an op-ed in the Connecticut Mirror last year from the head of the conservative Yankee Institute.

It doesn’t hold any weight and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Here’s why.

Housing policy in Connecticut can be confusing. It’s no wonder there are frequent misunderstandings.

A recent news story out of Litchfield County is a good case in point. “Towns in Connecticut's Northwest Corner are struggling with affordable housing mandate,” the headline reads. The story talks about how small towns with limited infrastructure are having a hard time seeing construction of the kind of affordable housing the state says it needs.

One problem with all that? There is no affordable housing mandate.

There was a telling moment in the Housing Committee’s public hearing on Feb. 27. State Sen. Martha Marx, a New London Democrat in her first year as chair of the committee, reminded everyone that when we talk about housing, it’s about a lot more than facts and figures, or budgets and charts.

It’s about people.

The subject was zoning, and the ever-popular topic of 8-30g. This is the state statute that allows developers to bypass certain zoning restrictions in the construction of affordable housing. It only applies in towns that are lacking in that category, and it allows zoning commissions to turn down projects in cases where health or safety is at issue. It doesn’t apply to environmental or other considerations.

With the state legislative session well under way, Gov. Ned Lamont’s recent budget speech attempted to set the tone of the next few months. 

As has been the case the past few years, the Governor touched on housing. The scope of the housing crisis is such that leaders across the spectrum are coming up with ways to take on the issue.

“We will continue investing $400 million per year in housing – workforce, affordable, supportive, and multi-family,” Lamont stated in his address to a joint session of the House and Senate. “People want to live in Connecticut, and the only thing holding us back is a lack of housing.”

Connecticut has seen ample evidence of its housing crisis recently, including at the state Capitol on Jan. 30. In a hearing before a joint session of the Housing and Planning & Development committees, lawmakers listened to a report detailing the need for more than 100,000 units to meet demand.

This goes along with what people see and hear every day. Prices are up, potential homebuyers find themselves in bidding wars, and renters are bereft of options in their price range. Connecticut is the most constrained state in the nation in terms of housing development, the recently released report from contractor ECOnorthwest found.

As the 2025 legislative session gets underway in Hartford, it’s hard not to have thoughts that wander further south. For while there are big issues to debate in Connecticut, so much of what happens in the coming years will be determined by the new administration soon to take over in Washington, D.C.

Much is unknown, and the Trump experience in national politics has been nothing if not unpredictable. In this case, we have the precedent of a previous White House term to look back on, but there’s no telling if that history will repeat itself.

The obstacles to building affordable housing can be daunting. Though it’s often towns themselves that present the biggest challenge through exclusionary zoning, sometimes the infrastructure simply isn’t in place to allow for the kind of density that most often leads to affordability.

That frequently means sewers. Whether we like to talk about it or not, waste disposal is a key factor in development. And none of it is cheap.

A recent opinion piece at LymeLine.com gets to this problem. As written by Eric Knapp, who is the Town of Old Lyme’s land use coordinator: “If the State of Connecticut is serious about rebalancing the housing market, here is what works: infrastructure and public services. If there was both public water and municipal septic disposal, there could be additional density.”