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. 

How Wealthy Towns Keep People With Housing Vouchers Out

By Jacqueline Rabe Thomas, ProPublica, January 9, 2020. 

Section 8 vouchers should give low-income people the opportunity to live outside poor communities. But discriminatory landlords, exclusionary zoning and the federal government’s hands-off approach leave recipients with few places to call home.

Available Here. 

Nonprofit wins grant to support Hartford residents leaving failed subsidized housing projects 

Rebecca Lurye, Hartford Courant, July 9, 2019. Available here.

Make CT more accommodating to housing and businesses

It's time to rewrite the confusing law that governs local zoning decisions

Jim Perras, CT Mirror, June 26, 2019. Available here.