The saddest part of the housing controversy facing Woodbridge and its residents — the likelihood it will be sued if it rejects a small, affordable housing project on a single-family lot — is that it didn’t have to happen.

The most hopeful part? It still doesn’t.

The jam Woodbridge has gotten itself into — allowing virtually no housing for the folks who cut their lawns, make their lattes, care for their elderly parents, teach their children — is a jam lots of Connecticut towns could soon face.

Dozens of municipalities don’t allow multifamily housing: apartments, condos, and technically, more than one unit on a parcel — and dozens more use their zoning regulations and purposely don’t provide water and sewer infrastructure to severely limit the less expensive homes many people need.

On a sunny spring afternoon in 2016, Richard Freedman went on a bike ride through New Canaan.

The housing developer was fresh off a disappointment. He had applied to build housing for low-income people in Westport, but his plan had just been rejected.

As he rode through the hillsides that afternoon — where mansions with gated entrances were separated from each other by four acres and stone walls — Freedman wondered whether civil rights groups or developers would ever find a way to change zoning laws so that more than one housing unit could be built on these huge lots. The properties take up most of the town and largely shut out those who need affordable housing.

New Canaan is one of the state’s most affluent and racially isolated communities, and Freedman had been turned away from building affordable housing there a few years earlier.

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 decades-old 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.

The contrast between New Haven and its suburban neighbor Woodbridge is impossible to miss.

In the city, duplexes and triplexes are packed side by side, with cars and motorcycles zipping through busy streets. Just over the line in Woodbridge, the urban density gives way to a colonnade of trees. Single-family homes, separated by wide lawns and stone walls, sit far back from the road.

The differences run far deeper than what is visible. In New Haven, a city of 130,000, the median household income is $42,222; in Woodbridge, a town of 8,750, it’s $157,610, nearly four times larger. New Haven residents are less than half white, 5% Asian, about a third Latinx and a third Black, while those in Woodbridge are more than three-quarters white, about 15% Asian and less than 10% Black and Latinx.

Affordable housing is the subject of a number of bills in Connecticut right now. But what do we really mean when we talk about "affordable housing"?

That conversation could start with a question much like the one asked by State Senator Dan Champagne at a virtual Planning and Development public hearing last week.

"Do you know how many affordable housing units exist in Connecticut?" Champagne asked of Sara Bronin.

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Is current zoning upholding racial discrimination and segregation? The simple answer is yes.

Our communities were built on zoning policy that was explicitly racist, and current practices maintain the status quo. Anyone seeking to better understand U.S. housing policy should read The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. The author traces the historical racial discrimination in housing and banking policy to the wealth disparities seen today.

Black families blocked from homeownership were prevented from building wealth, which directly correlates to modern-day wealth gaps. Black families were further blocked from accessing rental housing in suburban communities by zoning practices that prevented multifamily developments. Black families remained poorer and more likely to be renters, and today disproportionately benefit from access to affordable housing—both in rental and affordable homeownership efforts.

So, creating affordability and choice is fundamental to achieving desegregation.

Erin Boggs is the executive director of Open Communities Alliance and has been working on the issue of keeping housing affordable and equitable for some 20 years.

Erin joined Capitol Report to keep the conversation going in the video above.

On one point, there seems to be bi-partisan agreement among state legislators and many of those who testified during the Planning and Development Committee’s marathon 24-hour hearing on affordable housing this week: For many people, living in Connecticut is too expensive.

But fault lines emerged during the contentious hearing on how to remedy the high housing costs and the segregation that festers between poor and tony municipalities.

Empowered by the Black Lives Matter movement and its focus on racial justice, the long-stalled effort to address Connecticut’s legacy of geographic segregation is gaining fresh attention at the Capitol.

“Housing policy is at the nexus of so many other policy outcomes,” House Majority Leader Jason Rojas said. “It is ... central to the larger debate we’re having right now about equity and racial justice in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and also in the wake of the disproportionate impact COVID has had on lower income communities and communities of color.”

Connecticut is facing a series of crises. We are at the bottom of the barrel in terms of segregation, income inequality, housing affordability, infrastructure and economic mobility — and in the bottom half of states for fiscal stability. Over 208,000 families in Connecticut earning less than half of the median income (about $50,000 for a family of four) are paying over half of their income or more towards housing costs. The extent to which COVID-19 has ravaged Black and Latino communities is a palpable reflection of this inequality.

These current crises are in large part the result of federal, state and local government policies that fostered and perpetuate housing segregation. These policies include redlining, which started in the 1930s and was not technically banned until 1968, limited government-backed home loans and insurance to “stable” neighborhoods that deliberately excluded areas with significant Black and Latino populations. Scholars attribute a significant portion of today’s 90 percent wealth gap between Blacks and Latinos, on the one hand, and whites, on the other, directly to the home appreciation experienced by white families under this discriminatory government policy.