When it came time sell this particular 5-bedroom home in Woodbridge, located on a 1.5 acre lot studded with trees, the realtor pitched the house to prospective buyers with these inducements: “Location, location, location,” the ad proclaimed, adding that the “expansive home” has a floor plan capable of “accommodating anyone and everyone.”

The property – located just off the route taken by local politicians and residents as they marched over the summer chanting “Black Lives Matter” and toting signs that read “End White Silence” – is now at the center of a controversial proposal that challenges the town’s so-called “snob zoning,” which civil rights attorneys argue keeps Woodbridge segregated.

Civil-rights speakers threw down the gauntlet: “Snob” Woodbridge promotes segregation through exclusionary zoning.

Woodbridgers pushed back: “Elitist” interlopers have no business labeling their liberal ‘burb racist and trying to change their zoning laws.

That debate — the latest chapter in an ongoing quest to address affordable housing and racial segregation regionally rather than community-by-community — played out Monday night during a special meeting of the Woodbridge Town Planning & Zoning Commission. The nearly three-hour public hearing was held online on YouTube Live.

A group of former residents from Hartford’s North End is taking on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Center for Leadership and Justice filed suit on their behalf Wednesday, claiming that HUD failed to reduce segregation when giving them options for new housing.

Tenants endured black mold hanging from the ceiling. Mothers watched mice run through their children’s cribs on the baby monitor. These were among the claims detailed by members of the groups filing the suit outside Barbour Garden Apartments Wednesday.

For years, Marina Ilarraza’s family lived in a government-subsidized apartment in Hartford’s North End where mold adorned the shower, the windows wouldn’t shut, the heat worked sporadically and the water ran brown.

In the basement, a sewage backup left behind fleas and rotting cats. Drug violence in the neighborhood often prevented her children from playing outside.

She wanted out but had few options – until 2019, when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ended the last of its contracts with the landlords of the Ilarrazas’ apartment and two others in the city because of the deplorable conditions inside.

A coalition of state and national civil rights groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in federal court on Thursday, claiming that a new Trump administration rule will make it much more difficult to challenge unfair housing practices in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Civil rights groups on Thursday filed a pair of lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and HUD Secretary Ben Carson for weakening an Obama-era rule meant to keep lenders, landlords and insurers from discriminating.

Attorneys from the Open Communities Alliance, joined by law students and professors at a fair housing development clinic at Yale Law School, are asking Woodbridge’s Planning and Zoning Commission to approve their application to build a four-unit house on a 1.5 acre lot that is zoned for a single-family home – and, more importantly, to completely overhaul local zoning regulations to allow the town’s “fair share” of affordable housing to be built. The application is different from a typical zoning application in that it focuses almost entirely on the need for a systemic overhaul of the town’s “exclusionary” zoning regulations, as opposed to seeking approval to break ground on a single project.

There are tools to address the racial/ethnic health disparities exposed by the coronavirus

Now that we can quantify it, leaders have a moral obligation to address the problem

In Hartford, federal lawmakers pledge to hold HUD accountable for concentrating poverty in city neighborhoods, slum housing projects

By Rebecca Lurye, CT Mirror, January 17, 2020. 

Available here.