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January 26, 2024

No omnibus CT housing bills expected this legislative session

YEHYUN KIM / CT MIRROR Housing Committee chair Sen. Marilyn Moore, left, and Joe Quinn, a lawyer with the senate Democrats, talk in the senate chamber on June 7, 2023. Moore explained the housing omnibus bill to the Senate ahead of the vote June 7.

Homelessness, transit-oriented development and eviction reform are among the issues lawmakers and advocates say will be priorities for the upcoming legislative session, which begins next month.

Housing was one of the defining debates of the 2023 legislative session. Lawmakers pushed for major reforms to zoning policy that experts say would have meant widespread increases in density and affordable housing statewide.

But after weeks of negotiations, zoning reform was dropped from the housing bill. The final product primarily focused on renter’s rights. This session, advocates and lawmakers say they’re chipping away at the issue rather than proposing the sweeping reforms of last session.

“I’m not working on a big comprehensive, overturning zoning bills. I do see, as I like to say, the more painful incremental approach that I guess has to be taken on this issue,” said House Majority Leader Rep. Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford. 

Rojas has focused on housing issues and led a roundtable group on affordable housing. The bipartisan group met during the fall and winter to discuss the housing crisis and possible solutions.

Connecticut, like many states across the country, is wrestling with how to handle a dire lack of affordable housing. Rent is rising. Homelessness is increasing. There are few apartments available. Stock of houses available for sale is low.

The state lacks about 92,500 units of housing that are affordable and available to its lowest-income renters. Housing is typically considered affordable if a person pays about a third of their income to housing costs.

Lawmakers, advocates and lobbyists say it’s harder to get big bills on contentious issues passed during the shorter legislative session and an election year. Housing bills often face strong opposition.

Key legislative leaders say they think this session will have fewer broad housing bills and are aiming to take on the issue piece by piece.

“How do we start to chip away at this?,” said Sen. Marilyn Moore, Housing Committee co-chair and a Democrat from Bridgeport. “Taxes, land use, zoning, all those things together is the only way that we’re going to take this elephant apart piece by piece and figure out the best way to address this.”

Rojas said the other challenge is that because housing takes time to build, the effects of some changes aren’t seen for several years.

“There are a lot of opportunities to make those painfully incremental improvements, as painful as they are,” Rojas said. “They are improvements nonetheless. I think that’s a hard pill to swallow. I think everybody agrees that there’s a crisis, but there are those of us who are most concerned about the extent of the crisis and how little we are  doing to actually respond to that level of crisis.”

Republicans and some Democrats have opposed statewide zoning reform measures saying they weaken local control and force cookie-cutter solutions on towns with unique needs. And landlord groups have come out against some of the tenant protection measures that renter groups have proposed.

Republican leadership in the Housing and Planning and Development committees said they’d like to focus on reforms to 8-30g, one of the state’s affordable housing laws. They also hope to look at ways to make building easier for developers and help the homelessness response system.

Sen. Ryan Fazio, ranking member of the Planning and Development Committee, said he’s been encouraged by the majority leader’s roundtable conversations.

“I’m actually more hopeful now than I have ever been because of these conversations,” said Fazio, R-Greenwich.

Lawmakers on the Housing Committee said it was tough to set priorities in part because they weren’t sure what the plan was for leadership. 

Last session’s chair, Rep. Geoff Luxenberg, D-Manchester, was suspended from committee assignments late last year after an arrest for driving under the influence. Rep. Maryam Khan, D-Windsor, serves as the House Democrats’ vice chair.

Homelessness

Homeless service providers are asking for an additional $20 million for the state’s shelter system. Homelessness has been on the rise in Connecticut for the past two years, after almost a decade of declines.

A recent national report showed that homelessness in the United States hit a record high, according to a 2023 count. In Connecticut, people are staying in shelters longer, leaving many shelters at or close to maximum capacity.

Early this month, the state’s database of people who had officially entered the shelter system counted 4,435 people experiencing homelessness, about 550 of whom were living outside or in a place not meant for human habitation.

Sarah Fox, chief executive officer of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness, said they need the additional money just to keep people out of the cold and off the streets. During the last legislative session, they asked for $50 million to support the system and to annualize cold weather funding. They received only $5 million that had been previously allocated.

“It really is to support our shelter, our operations, our care coordination system, the homeless response and all of the work that we do on the ground to help people stay safe,” Fox said.

She said many of the challenges to addressing homelessness stem from a lack of affordable apartments. People struggle to find a place to move and stay in shelter for months.

“We are asking, I will say in our legislative agenda, for annualized committed funding,” she said. “It’s really hard to have a system of care for people who are housing-insecure and homeless without committed funding year after year.”

Fox had also called for the state to create an interagency council to focus on addressing homelessness, with representatives from different state agencies and service providers to collaborate. Gov. Ned Lamont announced the creation of such a council last week.

Several lawmakers said they wanted to work on the issue. 

Luxenberg said he thinks it will be a major priority for lawmakers in the coming session.

Moore said additional funding will likely be something the legislature looks at this session, although there should be support beyond more money. Rep. Tony Scott, R-Monroe, said it’s also something he wants to look at in addition to changes that may need to be made to the housing voucher system to make it easier to use a voucher when they get one. Housing vouchers pay a portion of an income-qualified person’s rent.

Rep. Eleni Kavros Degraw, D-Avon, who is co-chair of the Planning and Development Committee, said members may work on a bill to allow as-of-right development of tiny shelters at churches, mosques and temples to help address the problem.

Moore said she wants the housing committee to look at systemic ways to help prevent homelessness. She also hopes to look to manufactured housing — or housing that’s built in a factory — as a way to address homelessness.

Both of these solutions would require changes to zoning codes.

Zoning

Zoning has been a contentious political issue in Connecticut for years. Local zoning ordinances that make it hard to build multi-family housing are a major driver behind the lack of affordable housing in Connecticut, housing experts say.

Housing experts and advocates say statewide reform is needed to push towns to allow developers to build more apartments, but such proposals have faced fierce opposition.

Lawmakers say it’s likely they’ll work on a proposal to push towns to develop more density close to train and bus stations, a planning concept known as transit-oriented development. Lamont has said he supports implementing the work of the Municipal Redevelopment Authority, a quasi-public group established in 2019 without funding that encourages towns to use transit-oriented development.

Desegregate Connecticut, an advocacy group affiliated with the Regional Plan Association, will also put forward a proposal similar to the one they advocated for last session called Work, Live, Ride.

Under last year’s proposal, towns could opt in and get access to state money for certain infrastructure improvements including expansion of sewer and water services and remediation for “brownfields,” or polluted sites such as former gas stations or cleaners.

The state’s Office of Responsible Growth would assist towns and accept applications regarding transit districts. There is a sliding scale of affordability percentages based on the area’s housing market.

Desegregate CT director Pete Harrison said this year’s proposal is similar, with a few tweaks including environmental protection measures, particularly to protect wetlands. The bill also won’t reach into as many areas as last year’s proposal.

“We are getting away from some of the density and population differences and focusing on ‘missing middle,’ reduction in parking requirements,” Harrison said. Missing middle is a term that means medium-density housing, such as town homes or duplexes.

Kavros DeGraw said she thinks it’s likely the Planning and Development Committee will take up transit-oriented development again. Sen. MD Rahman, co-chair of the committee, said details aren’t finalized, but he anticipates there will be a bill addressing the issue.

Rahman, D-Manchester, said he also wants to look at ways to make it easier to transform former commercial properties into residential.

“Overall, we should not be behind,” Rahman said. “We should lead. Nationally, we are behind on the housing shortage. We should not be behind. We should be leading the nation.”

Fazio said he wants to look at other ways to increase housing, such as more liberal regulations around accessory dwelling units or changes to building codes that could make it cheaper for developers to build.

Fazio said he’s more hopeful about transit-oriented development than other ideas such as fair share. He voted against Work, Live, Ride last session because he thought it wasn’t fully fleshed out, he said.

Last session, lawmakers tried to work out a deal to introduce a concept known as “fair share” in Connecticut. The bill would have divided housing needs regionally among towns and required each to zone for a certain number of units. But lawmakers said that idea likely won’t be back until 2025 at the earliest.

Fazio said he thinks there’s rooms for compromise, but he’s opposed to fair share.

“I think there’s the possibility in the coming years for compromise and promise on the issue, but there also remains the possibility that a more ideologically charged package like fair share in its first iteration is advanced,” Fazio said.

He and other Republicans are opposed to several measures that would force towns to change zoning rules.

Erin Boggs, executive director at the Open Communities Alliance, said her group is focused on eviction reform efforts rather than fair share. The alliance was one of the leaders of a coalition that pushed for fair share last session. She said she thinks there are also ways that different zoning proposals can work together and complement one another.

“I think transit-oriented development works very well within a fair share framework,” she said.

Eviction

The Connecticut Tenants Union is one of a coalition of groups, including Open Communities Alliance, that are pushing for an expansion of good-cause protections for renters.

These types of protections, which prohibit eviction without cause, already exist for certain groups such as senior citizens and people with disabilities. Evictions without cause typically occur when a tenant’s lease expires and the landlord declines to renew it.

The Connecticut Fair Housing Center has pushed for expansion of good-cause protections in past legislative sessions and is working with the tenants union. 

Rents have been rising, and last session’s proposal to cap annual rent increases didn’t pass. 

Good-cause protections would help tenant unions in Connecticut negotiate for repairs and lower rent. Many tenant union members have faced refusals to renew their leases because of their organizing, said Luke Melonakos-Harrison, a New Haven organizer and vice-president of the statewide group.

“Rents and wages have not been increasing in parallel with each other, and that gap has widened for decades now,” Melonakos-Harrison. “If the legislature isn’t going to intervene this year, then what we have to do is organize tenant unions powerful enough to bring our landlords to the negotiating table to negotiate directly for stable rents.”

Lawmakers were noncommittal about the expansion, but said they wanted to look at the issue and were willing to listen.

Luxenberg said he had other tenant protections he wanted to work on, including eliminating move-in and move-out fees and requiring notice when rent is going to go up.

A report from the Office of Legislative Research also said that lawmakers may consider expanding the number of fair rent commissions. These commissions have the power to receive complaints about rent increases and help the parties reach a compromise or limit the increase.

Sean Ghio, policy director at the Partnership for Strong Communities, said his organization would also ask for more funding for the state’s Rental Assistance Program. 

As rents rise, advocates are concerned that the state won’t be able to afford the same number of participants in the program in future years. This could mean that as people leave the program, the state doesn’t take on new applicants, Ghio said.

They’d like to see the number of participants expanded.

“We are asking to fill that hole but also to begin to make a dent in meeting the need for housing vouchers,” Ghio said.

8-30g

Scott said he also wants to work on reforming 8-30g this session. Republicans have proposed such measures for the last couple of legislative sessions.

The decades-old law offers developers court remedies if proposals for affordable housing are denied. Towns are exempt from the law if at least 10% of their housing stock is set aside as affordable. Few towns have met this benchmark.

The law flips the burden of proof in these cases. If a local zoning board turns down an application that is 8-30g compliant, the local commission has to prove that the denial was related to specific reasons related to public health or safety, that these interests clearly outweigh the need for affordable housing, and that the public interests cannot be protected by reasonable changes to the proposal.

“It’s heavy-handed in its nature. It also creates an adversarial environment that dissuades municipalities from building more housing unless it meets these specifications [in the law],” Fazio said.

Proponents of the law say it wasn’t meant to completely meet the affordable housing need, just to be used as a tool to increase housing that’s designated affordable.

Scott said he had thought at the end of last session that lawmakers were going to work on the issue again this session. He wants more types of units such as manufactured housing to be included in the calculation of how much of a town’s housing is affordable.

Moore said she’s unsure about proposals to change that law.

“Do they want to throw it away? What do they want to do with it?” she said. “It would depend on do you want to enhance it? Do you want to make it stronger?”

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