By Chris Powell
Assuming the accuracy of a recent opinion poll commissioned by various social-justice groups, Connecticut should have no trouble solving its housing shortage.
The poll claims that most state residents agree that state government should override municipal zoning that restricts housing construction, penalize towns that fail to allow a full range of housing, and even limit housing rent increases to 2½% per year.
But as many polls do, this one says exactly what its sponsors wanted it to say. So it’s not to be trusted.
For if the poll results were really so accurate, residents of Avon and Woodbridge, suburbs whose exclusive zoning protects them against poverty and its pathologies, would be clamoring for construction of tenements to house the thousands of single-parent families the mayors of Hartford and New Haven long have wanted to export.
The mayors know only too well that many people in Connecticut don’t pull their own weight and so are financial and social burdens wherever they live. And as Hearst Connecticut Media columnist Hugh Bailey noted the other day, the “not in my back yard” attitude toward new housing is prevalent even in the cities. For more housing [ITALICS] anywhere [END ITALICS] means more crowding, traffic, and the risk of fatherless kids living nearby and dragging down school performance while raising school costs.
That is, while most people may acknowledge that more housing is great in principle, practice may mean something else to them. If the housing poll had asked people to specify a location in their towns that would be good for new housing, most probably would [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] have answered “next door.”
Zoning in Connecticut is too exclusive, city populations are far too impoverished, and racial and economic class segregation are much too severe. But even many poor people who aspire to become middle class strive to get away from the pathologies of their poor neighbors. Exclusive zoning is the predictable response to those pathologies. Reduce the risk that those pathologies will come into a neighborhood and the housing shortage will become much easier to solve politically.
First of all, ending poverty in Connecticut requires state government to stop manufacturing it, as state government does with its disastrous welfare and education policies.
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LOONEY THE BODY SNATCHER: Connecticut Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, is a strange sort of civil libertarian.
Fearing that the U.S. Supreme Court, lately leaning conservative, will reverse certain precedents as it recently reversed its abortion precedent, Roe v. Wade, Looney has introduced legislation to put certain civil rights into state law, including the rights to contraception and same-sex and interracial marriage; the rights to be informed of one’s constitutional rights upon one’s arrest and to be given legal counsel; and the right of illegal immigrant children to attend public school. (Connecticut abortion law already incorporates the principles of the Roe decision.)
While no one in Connecticut seems to be proposing to undo those rights, and while the state Constitution almost surely would be construed to protect them, it’s remotely possible that the U.S. Supreme Court could retreat from one of them, so there’s no harm in putting them into state law as well.
But meanwhile Looney also has proposed legislation to have state government claim the corpses of motorcyclists killed in crashes while not wearing a helmet. State government would use the corpses for organ donations, on Looney’s presumption that any motorcyclist who rides without a helmet doesn’t care about what happens to his health or his corpse.
That presumption is terribly arrogant, and while motorcyclists may be foolish for riding without helmets, even then their next-of-kin have a claim to their remains that is far superior to government’s. After all, the Fourth Amendment declares a right that Looney’s corpse-confiscation bill overlooks: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”
To the next-of-kin of a fatally injured motorcyclist, that Fourth Amendment right might be dearer than the rights Looney proposes to add to state law — and don’t even the politically incorrect, like motorcyclists and their families, have rights too?
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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
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Chris Powell column 