By Chris Powell
Anyone of a certain age who reflects upon Connecticut’s housing policy might be reminded of a Rube Goldberg contraption.
Goldberg was the cartoonist of the last century who became famous for drawing imaginary devices that performed simple tasks in ridiculously complicated and inefficient ways.
Inadvertently honoring Goldberg, Connecticut lets municipal zoning prevent construction of the housing needed to meet demand, making housing scarce and expensive. Then, with money from the federal government, Connecticut operates a system of rental vouchers subsidizing poor people who can’t afford rents that have been driven up in large part by restrictive zoning.
But as a recent report by the Hearst Connecticut newspapers showed, the voucher program itself is ridiculously complicated. For the vouchers often can be used only in municipalities where there are no rental vacancies. Using the vouchers also can involve much tedious paperwork. So thousands of vouchers that have been issued in Connecticut go unused every year.
Thus the public interest in reducing the cost of housing and relieving the burden on the poor is thwarted. The poor have to live at a greater distance from their workplaces and the higher travel cost makes them poorer still.
Despite Connecticut’s bad example, it’s not always politically impossible to build housing on a broad scale. The South lately has been leading the country in housing construction and thus in population gains and economic growth as well. Zoning doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem down there.
While the South has more undeveloped land, Connecticut has plenty of room for more housing. Cities have many vacant old factories and run-down tenements that could be renovated or replaced, and suburbs are full of empty shopping malls and parking lots.
Though densely populated, the city-state of Singapore long has shown that it is politically possible to build much excellent multi-family housing — even public housing, the sort of housing that government in the United States has given a bad name.
Indeed, most housing in Singapore consists of apartment towers built by the government itself whose units are leased to city residents on a long-term basis, with the residents encouraged to purchase them by borrowing from their government social insurance account. They can sell their units.
Owner occupancy may be crucial. Singaporeans easily become property owners with housing security and a greater stake in society, and far from being a dysfunctional and dangerous welfare dump like many American cities, their city-state is spectacular, with little poverty, crime, income inequality, and homelessness. Singapore’s people are highly educated.
But Singapore rewards family cohesion instead of childbearing outside marriage and enforces standards in education, shunning social promotion. If Connecticut did that it would destroy the state’s poverty industry.
* * *
THANKS AGAIN FOR NOTHING: State government is broadcasting television commercials touting its new retirement savings mechanism for private-sector workers, MyCTSavings, a mechanism that businesses are being required to offer.
But like state government’s paid leave program for private-sector workers, MyCTSavings is nothing more than what people easily can arrange for themselves.
The paid leave program is only self-insurance. Everyone working in the private sector is taxed half of 1% of his salary for the paid leave fund and under limited circumstances, adjudicated by the Paid Leave Authority, can claim paid time off from work. State government contributes nothing.
Anyone could accomplish that and more with an ordinary savings account, which would give people access to all their money all the time for anything.
MyCTSavings only duplicates the individual retirement accounts offered by many financial houses and banks, with regular contributions made through automatic payroll deductions or deductions from the account holder’s checking account. Again state government contributes nothing.
State law could have required private-sector workers to maintain an IRA, as it could have required them to maintain savings accounts. But participation in MyCTSavings is optional. Like the paid leave program, the only thing My CTSavings does for sure is enlarge state government.
—–
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
-END-
Chris Powell column 