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August 9, 2024

Chris Murphy to focus more on housing, weigh in on CT zoning law

GINNY MONK / CT MIRROR Sen. Chris Murphy speaks to housing advocates, service providers, state and local officials and residents about housing issues in Torrington on Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024.
By Ginny Monk, CT Mirror

State lawmakers can expect to hear U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy’s take on zoning policy in the upcoming legislative session as the senator increases his office’s focus on housing issues.

Murphy, D-Conn, shared his interest in the state-level policy issue while speaking to a group of state and local officials, and housing and homelessness service providers in Torrington on Thursday. Discussion at the Northwest Connecticut’s Chamber of Commerce ranged from housing vouchers to zoning to homelessness.

“We have made a decision that we are going to make it really hard, often impossible, in this state to build multi-unit housing,” Murphy said. “That at the core is the problem. Now that’s not a federal issue, that is a state and local issue.”

Thursday’s gathering followed a series of listening sessions during which Murphy traveled around Connecticut to talk with residents about housing issues.

The senator weighed in on one of the state’s more contentious political issues during the conversation, saying restrictive local zoning was “at the core,” of the lack of affordable housing in Connecticut.

The state lacks more than 92,000 units of housing that are affordable and available to its lowest-income residents and thousands more Connecticut residents spend more than a third of their income on rent.

Experts have tied this to a lack of housing development in the state and restrictive local zoning that makes it hard to build multi-family housing on most of Connecticut’s land. Connecticut Public recently reported that the statewide apartment vacancy rate stands at just 3.5%.

Murphy said on his annual walk across the state, housing was the No. 1 issue that voters mentioned as a problem. He said part of being a good elected official in his role is understanding when there are issues that should have gotten more attention earlier.

“There are sometimes issues that you should have been spending more time on earlier in your career, and you have to adjust,” Murphy said. “This is an issue that I am diving into that was not probably one of my top one or two or three issues a decade ago that I’m spending more and more time on, because it is just 100% clear to me that this is an issue here in Connecticut that is rising up people’s priority list.”

State lawmakers have considered statewide zoning reform measures during the past several legislative sessions, but progress has been what House Majority Leader Rep. Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, refers to as “painful incrementalism.”

Housing has been shown to be a key issue on voters’ minds as they head into the upcoming election, and politicians from both sides of the aisle have made public appearances to boost their party’s standing in recent weeks. 

Murphy brought up the presidential race toward the end of the meeting Thursday.

“When I served with Kamala Harris in the United States Senate, there was nobody in the Democratic caucus that spent more time thinking creatively about housing than she did, and so I am expecting that if she wins this election, we are going to have an opportunity to really build some interesting, impactful new federal housing policy,” he said.

Murphy said he thinks much of the federal government’s role in housing affordability is by offering funding.

“I’m prepared to jump sort of deeper into that issue [zoning] in the state legislature next session,” Murphy said. “That’s not technically my business, but it’s got to be my business, because the federal money can’t go as far as I’d like it to go.”

Northwest Connecticut came into focus during the last legislative session during pushes for more funding for the state’s homeless response system because providers and lawmakers said it had a growing number of encampments, particularly ahead of the winter months.

Providers weren’t able to get emergency cold-weather shelters set up as quickly as they wanted to because notice from the state Department of Housing about how much funding they’d have was delayed.

​Dan Santorso, executive assistant at Friends in Service to Humanity of Northwestern Connecticut, said it wasn’t a safe situation.

“I hope that this year, it goes smoother than last year,” Santorso said. “Last year was dangerous to a lot of our people, and we were actually, I think, just very lucky that the temperatures weren’t freezing earlier in the season.”

Homelessness is increasing in Connecticut, and providers told officials Thursday that they need more resources for housing, preventing homelessness and mental health care and addiction services.

“It really takes state-level commitment of resources for our homeless response system and really making sure our providers have livable wages and the resources that they need to provide the support to people,” said Sarah Fox, chief executive officer at the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness.

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