By Chris Powell
As much as Connecticut badly needs more housing to reduce the cost of living in the state, it’s not surprising that the state law that was enacted last year to spur housing construction is accomplishing nothing.
The law requires only that a study be made of how much more housing each municipality should have, and the state Office of Policy and Management was slow to hire a consultant to undertake the study. The consultant was hired only a few weeks ago and the study is not expected to be ready for the legislature’s consideration until after the legislature’s session next year.
Additionally, the law is afflicted with an off-putting name. It’s called the “fair share” law, which indicates that from a municipal perspective more housing is an awful burden even if it is good for the state as a whole.
Yes, wherever it goes more housing means more traffic, more children to educate, more strain on municipal facilities, more municipal expense, and potentially more people who cause trouble or can’t or won’t support themselves. Decades of failed poverty and urban policies have turned most of Connecticut’s cities into concentration camps for the poor and profit centers for the government class, thereby prompting the flight of the middle class to the suburbs.
Suburban residents are not really bigoted for wanting protection from what failed policy has done to the cities.
The “fair share” allocations to be recommended by the housing law’s study probably won’t be well received unless concerns about the pathologies of urban poverty are addressed. A government under which those pathologies have only worsened for a long time is not likely to have much credibility even if it purports to address them anew.
But maybe attitudes would be different if, instead of just imposing “fair shares” on municipalities, state government used housing law to award municipalities substantial bonuses. In that case there would be all sorts of things state government could do to get housing built and received with good grace.
Indeed, if state government really thought that increasing the housing supply was crucial, it long ago would have lifted all “special education” costs off municipalities and assumed them itself. Those costs are huge and disproportionately involve the neglected children of poor households. Those costs are just some of those imagined by suburban officials and residents when they hear pleas for “affordable housing.”
In the recent session of the General Assembly it was argued that $80 million more in state financing would greatly reduce the “special education” burden on municipalities. But the legislature and the governor couldn’t find the money. Instead they spent far more on raises for unionized state government employees, the majority political party’s army.
Municipalities might be enthusiastic about more housing if state government stopped housing intended particularly for the poor and instead assisted only market-rate housing. For eventually any substantial amount of new housing will reduce the cost of all other housing. Some people will always object to any new housing nearby, but market-rate housing prompts much less objection.
To address the ordinary school costs of new housing, state government could pay municipalities that achieved their housing goals a big and perpetual bonus on their per-pupil education aid. Such a bonus would relieve municipalities of the pressure to develop commercially and industrially to gain property tax revenue to pay for a larger school population.
Similarly, municipalities achieving housing goals could be rewarded by state government with perpetual exemption from binding arbitration for municipal employee union contracts and from other state mandates.
Of course a policy of making housing construction highly profitable for municipalities would shift the social costs of housing from municipal government to state government, and then state government would have to find the money somewhere — from different taxpayers or different beneficiaries of state government spending.
But if housing is really a compelling state issue and not just another excuse for politically correct posturing, state government is where financial responsibility should rest.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 
There is another consideration to adding a substantial amount of newly built housing outside of the inner cities and in the suburbs. It will have the (perhaps) unintended consequence of discouraging rehabiltation of older housing — not just affordable housing but also market-rate. Many suburbs have large stocks of mid-1950s-to-’70s multifamily housing that are now in need of upgrades to internal utilities, layouts, and finishes. Without these reinvestments the properties will continue to degrade.
With newly built units and complexes luring more financially mobile residents, these older properties will become the slums of tomorrow.
While historic rehab and reuse has a certain cache and is certainly good for maintaining character and revitalizing underused properties, we suburban towns are primarily post-war construction in growing need of reinvestment to maintain value and grand lists. Too much new housing construction will undermine the suburbs the way the suburbs undermined the cities 70 years ago.
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