How affordable housing rules protect wealthy enclaves in Connecticut

In Cheshire, a town that is 79% white and has a high opportunity level, a zoning ordinance aimed at developers of affordable housing reads as follows:

“In addition, the applicant shall present to the Commission a marketing plan reasonably designed to assure that priority in the first sale of affordable units shall be as follows (in descending order): a) Current residents of the Town of Cheshire who have been so for at least two (2) continuous years. b) Non-resident children of current residents as defined at (a), above. c) Residents of the New Haven-Meriden metropolitan statistical area currently employed in the Town of Cheshire. d) All others.”

Residency preferences such as this one across the state of Connecticut ensure that people who can obtain access to affordable housing in high opportunity areas, such as Cheshire, have already been been able to afford being part of that community for several years. This tactic expressly excludes people from other areas of the state who are crowded into low opportunity metropolitan areas such as Hartford.

In my time working for Open Communities Alliance (OCA), a coalition leader of fair housing nonprofits in the state of Connecticut, I worked on gathering information on zoning ordinances and section 8 housing plans across the state as well as affordable housing data.

The situation I discovered, particularly regarding zoning and the rejection of affordable housing, was worse than I ever imagined.

Residency preferences within zoning documents like Cheshire’s contravene the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by giving preference in access to affordable housing to an economically and racially skewed section of the population. This tactic is almost exclusively employed by wealthy, high opportunity towns in Connecticut such as Wilton, Westport, Roxbury, and multiple others.

As of last year, 13 towns out of 171 had explicit residency preferences for affordable housing applicants, each of which qualified as “high” or “very high” opportunity level based on income, school rankings, and access to important resources. Many of wealthiest towns, however, don’t have these requirements as they understand people with lower incomes could never afford to live in their towns and they will never willingly bring affordable housing to their towns, meaning they have no reason for a residency requirement to begin with.

The state of Connecticut has long been known for dramatic wealth gaps and failing infrastructure far greater than most of its counterparts. With the highest average top 1% earnings in the nation at $952,902, and a Gini Coefficient (statistical measure of wealth inequality) behind only New York, DC, and Puerto Rico, Connecticut is a safe haven for the wealthy while failing millions of its less wealthy residents.

While lack of investment into cities such as Hartford and New Haven have led to intense clusters of poverty, the use of restrictive zoning ordinances throughout the state have allowed concentrated pockets of money to stay insulated from affordable housing and diversified populations. Segregated housing leads to an under-educated and under-supported population, both in impoverished and wealthy areas as people are deprived of cultural exchange and diverse experiences.

While towns from every opportunity level and racial makeup have restrictive zoning measures, only wealthy, predominantly white towns insist on people obtaining affordable housing being from that town or county. Nearly every other town used tactics such as only requiring publication of listings in the local newspaper; requiring affordable housing be reserved for the elderly (discriminating against young families); requiring houses to be built on an acre or more of land; density requirements as low as 4.5 units per acre; reserving the right to veto anything that affects the “overall community standards” (e.g. Woodbridge); countless ways to discourage developers or not zoning for affordable housing at all.

Here’s a link to the spreadsheet I created detailing information from every zoning ordinance in the state. It should give you an idea of exactly the sort of practices that need to become illegal so we can have fair housing for everyone in this state.

For the past several years, OCA and its coalition partners in GrowingTogetherCT have been working to pass the Fair Share bill in the Connecticut state legislature, and the people of Connecticut must do everything we can to ensure this bill is successful. Fair Share would eliminate the power restrictive zoning ordinances have to prevent affordable housing from being developed or stop the people that need it the most from finding housing in places with good schools and important resources.

I worked at OCA at the very end of the 2023 legislative session and Growing Together CT came the closest they’d ever come to passing Fair Share. The bill determines the burden of affordable housing each municipality in the state should have based on housing they already have and the capacity they have for more. What Fair Share takes into account is that the vast majority of affordable housing in the state is in Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, and a handful of other cities, forcing over a hundred thousand people into cramped areas with poor quality housing and bad schools.

Housing is fundamental to every aspect of life, and without access to high opportunity areas, these Connecticut residents will never have the resources they need to succeed.

Fair Share would solve not only the issue of an under-housed population but hold accountable the municipalities that have vehemently rejected supporting struggling citizens of this state to protect their wealthy enclaves.

Pushing this necessary advancement off is preventing Connecticut from nurturing its best and brightest individuals and affording basic quality of life to hundreds of thousands of its residents. Talk to your representatives and tell them Connecticut needs Fair Share to become a national leader in housing equity.

Felix Thompson is a graduating senior in the Public Policy department at Trinity College.