By Chris Powell
Exclusive zoning in the suburbs is getting all the blame for Connecticut’s severe shortage of housing, and Governor Lamont and the General Assembly are being bitterly criticized for not doing much about it during the recent legislative session.
But troublesome as exclusive zoning is for driving up the cost of housing and perpetuating economic, racial, and ethnic segregation, it is not the only part of the housing problem — not even the bigger part of it.
Exclusive zoning in Connecticut goes back to colonial times, when life was hard and fragile and towns could not afford to take care of residents who could not support themselves. Society had little surplus to share and no welfare system. So the early towns required aspiring residents to apply to become an “admitted inhabitant.” Those who moved into the town without official approval were officially “warned out.”
The ancient fear of expense endures in zoning today, and with good reason. “Affordable” housing typically means multifamily housing; multifamily housing typically means housing for the poor; and housing for the poor typically means negligent single parents with children who are far behind in their intellectual development and suffering behavioral problems, making them difficult and expensive to educate. They put strain on municipal property taxes, diminish school performance, and increase crime.
Of course “affordable” housing also means housing for young people just starting out in life, the children of some of the very people who support exclusive zoning. But the mess this country has made of its cities in the last half century tips opinion against “affordable” housing in the suburbs. Indeed, the suburbs have grown precisely because people aspiring to the middle class wanted to get away from the pathologies of urban poverty.
Some critics of exclusive zoning call this phenomenon racist. That seems to exempt them from addressing the failure of poverty policy.
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The situation reflects what is essentially Connecticut’s social contract. Most people will let the Democratic Party operate the cities as poverty and patronage factories as long as pleasant suburbs are available to people who want to escape. Critics of the failure of the governor and the legislature to do much about the housing problem don’t seem to notice that the decisive political impediment to eliminating exclusive zoning is Democratic legislators from the suburbs.
Suburban Democratic legislators are glad for their party to reap its statewide election pluralities from people perpetually dependent on government income supports in the cities. But these legislators know that importing a lot of poor people and neglected children into their own towns would be unpopular and might induce their constituents to consider voting Republican.
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Other factors quite apart from zoning are making housing scarce and expensive in Connecticut.
The state is said to need a minimum of 90,000 more housing units even as an estimated 120,000 immigrants are living in the state illegally. Any state that facilitates illegal immigration as Connecticut does and has “sanctuary” cities has little right to complain about a shortage of housing.
The ruinous inflation of recent years has made housing and other necessities unaffordable for many people and is a function of the federal government’s excessive money creation and distribution. Connecticut’s vaunted state budget surplus and the many goodies being distributed by elected officials here arise from that money creation. But those elected officials don’t explain how the surplus and those goodies are the flip side of soaring prices.
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The housing problem would diminish greatly — along with many other problems — if more people were able to support themselves financially. But that won’t happen while public education continues to collapse. Not surprisingly, student performance has fallen with the abandonment of academic standards.
The state Education Department and the teacher unions have yet to explain how social promotion and the awarding of high school diplomas to students who have not earned them prepare them for anything more than a life of menial work, poverty, and housing insecurity.
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 