by Jamil Ragland
HARTFORD, CT – Several reports released in the past week have shown that Connecticut’s affordable housing crisis continues to worsen, with rising costs and constrained supply making it difficult for renters to find quality affordable housing.
A report from the Federal Housing Finance Agency found that Connecticut experienced the 7th highest percent change in housing prices, at 9.64%, from the first quarter of 2023 to the same time period this year. That figure outpaces the average national increase, which stood at 6.6%. Three out of the four Connecticut metro areas listed in the report saw increases even greater than the state average.
Those high costs are a major reason why another report, from Consumer Affairs, lists Connecticut as the worst state for renters in the nation. The other notes a lack of housing supply, as the report indicates that Connecticut has a 3.5% vacancy rate. According to the Federal Reserve, that rate is about half of the national vacancy rate of 6.6%.
To make matters worse, the state is not building enough units to increase housing supply in a significant way to make a difference in housing prices, according to the Connecticut Economic Digest, a joint publication of the Department of Labor and the Department of Economic and Community Development. The digest released its June edition showing a precipitous drop in permits for new home construction. The rate of new home construction permits peaked in 2004 at nearly 3,000 a quarter before collapsing during the Great Recession of 2008-09 and the recovery period that followed. The pace has not rebounded since, with barely over 1,000 new permits issued in the first quarter this year.
“It’s clear that this didn’t happen overnight, and we’ve seen indicators like this for years,” said Sean Ghio, policy director at the Partnership for Strong Communities, a housing advocacy organization. “There’s things that have made it worse, such as the interest rate environment making it harder to buy a home. But the bottom line is, this is a problem ultimately of supply. Not enough in the supply we have, not enough supply where people want it, and not enough of the kind of supply people want. We’re still a state that thinks we should be building big family homes on acre-plus lots.”
Lauren Tagliatela, the co-chair of the government relations committee for the Connecticut Apartment Association, agrees. She said that towns and their rules for building homes are a major cause of the affordable housing shortage.
“Connecticut is known for its restrictive zoning. If we want to start chipping away at this housing crisis, we have to have multi-family homes built. And that’s gonna come in the shape of two and three family homes as well as apartment communities,” she said in a phone interview. “We also have to look at things like accessory dwelling units. How can we make it easier for people to put an in-law apartment in their backyard, that kind of thing. You have to have a multiple prong approach to solve something that’s complicated. But I think over-restrictive zoning is one of the worst contributors to where we are now.”
Tagliatela said that NIMBYism often stands in the way of efforts to build more housing.
“Just a few neighbors of a proposed project can stop projects from being built,” she said. “I think housing providers need to educate the public more on the positive benefits of multifamily housing in their towns. For example, how the owners of these developments are often the largest tax payers in town and this helps keep single family resident’s taxes down. When we build more apartments we boost jobs and generate more business for the area. I don’t think the general public thinks about that.”
Tagliatela said the Connecticut Apartment Association is ready to have discussions with policymakers about how to address the affordability crisis.
However, advocates say little help has arrived from the state government recently to mitigate the problem. Attempts to address the housing crisis by the General Assembly have gone nowhere. During the session that ended in May, ,the legislature considered two major housing bills. House Bill 5390, known as the Work Live Ride bill, would have incentivized communities to build more housing around public transportation. Senate Bill 143 would have expanded to most Connecticut renters the existing protections that prevent elderly and disabled renters from being evicted without just cause. The bills each failed to receive votes from both chambers of the legislature.
“There’s a lot of examples of policies across the country that have improved access to affordable houses. And so it’s not a question about policy so much as it is political will. And as demonstrated in the last few years, our leaders do not have the political will to make significant changes in order to increase the supply of affordable housing, or housing in general, in every community in the state where it’s needed,” Ghio said.
He said that it’s not the entire legislature that is preventing action on the housing crisis, and commended the leadership of both the House and the Senate for talking about housing affordability and standing up a roundtable to discuss solutions for the housing crisis. But he said it’s difficult to get enough legislators on board to enact policy change though.
“Housing is decided locally, but it’s actually a regional need,” Ghio said. “The state has to ensure that we have enough housing, and that it’s affordable, and that it’s where we need it to be. We’re failing at that, and it’s largely due to a failure of many towns to address the issue.”