By Chris Powell
Despite Connecticut’s high housing costs and severe shortage of housing, Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported last week that half the federal government housing vouchers issued in the state in the last three years have expired unused. That’s about 3,000 vouchers.
The federal government estimates that about $1.6 million in available housing subsidies is going unspent in Connecticut each month, money that might cover shelter for about 1,700 families.
Meanwhile homelessness in Connecticut has begun to rise again after declining for years under state government’s effort to provide more of what is called supportive housing — small apartments linked to social services. With many troubled people, getting a secure room with some privacy is the crucial first step toward recovery of their mental and physical health.
Of course part of the problem with the unused vouchers is Connecticut’s general shortage of housing. Even when they receive vouchers, poor people in Connecticut have great difficulty finding suitable housing they can afford in the areas where they need to reside. Many vouchers are valid only in the towns that issued them, though housing in nearby towns might suffice. Federal, state, and municipal rules for voucher use can be complicated and discouraging. And some landlords are reluctant to accept vouchers, in part because of delays in processing them, but also because poor people are less desirable tenants.
A woman cited in the Hearst report said she ended up moving to Ohio when her six-month effort to use her housing voucher in Connecticut failed.
This problem with housing vouchers would seem to call for urgent legislative investigations at both the state and federal level. Could vouchers be made redeemable everywhere, not just in the city or town whose housing authority issued them? Could the government create and maintain a master regional registry of rental housing openings where vouchers are accepted? Could voucher rules and processing be streamlined? And, of course, what can Connecticut do to increase housing construction generally?
Maybe Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat just re-elected to a third six-year term, could look into helping people get housing with government vouchers when he’s not so busy helping people get Taylor Swift concert tickets.
* * *
West Haven’s scandal with the embezzlement of $1.2 million in federal virus epidemic relief money jumped to Ansonia last week. Former Democratic state Rep. Michael DiMassa, who was simultaneously a West Haven city government functionary who ran the embezzlement and who has pleaded guilty to federal charges, testified in court in Hartford that he arranged for some of the relief money to be paid to three women with whom he was having romantic relationships. He said one was his colleague in the General Assembly, Rep. Kara Rochelle, D-Ansonia, who got a city government check for $5,000, supposedly for consulting work about a new city firehouse.
Rochelle insists that she was qualified to do the consulting. But the Valley Independent Sentinel reports that Rochelle was given no contract or written description of her responsibilities, that her work for West Haven lasted only two months, that the city also employed a New York company for consulting on the firehouse project for much more money, $180,000, and that the project was canceled.
Rochelle’s evasion of the central question — whether she had an intimate relationship with the man who got her the money he embezzled from West Haven — undermines her indignation about being questioned. She says, “I will not stand by while politically motivated gossips use the oldest sexist tropes in the book to attack me.”
But there is nothing “sexist” in pursuing how and why embezzled government money was spent. Nobody would be asking about Rochelle’s personal life if it wasn’t tangled up with that money.
Besides, state legislators should be wary about drawing income from municipalities, lest they seem to be using their office for personal gain.
Despite Rochelle’s evasiveness, Democrats in her district are standing by her, and the party’s leadership in the state House of Representatives is looking the other way. After all, the next legislative election is two years off.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
-END-
Chris Powell column 