By CHRIS POWELL
Last week Governor Lamont and state legislators congratulated themselves for reaching a compromise on the housing legislation the governor vetoed in June over concerns that it would have weakened municipal zoning too much. The new legislation aims to get municipalities and state government working together to set housing goals, tinkers with zoning regulations like those for parking spaces for multi-family housing, and offers subsidies to municipalities that make room for new residents.
State government endures three more scandals in a week
Can Democrats ever deliver ‘a city we can afford’?
Tantrum by Democrats isn’t worth hobbling government
But under the new legislation, responsibility for getting housing built would remain scattered, shared between state government, municipalities, zoning boards, and developers. Neither state government nor municipal governments would be required to get housing built by a certain time. So it will be surprising if, in the first year after its enactment, the legislation prompts construction of even a thousand inexpensive housing units more than would have been built without it.
Indeed, the legislation seems pathetic in the face of what has been called Connecticut’s housing “emergency,” the state’s urgent need for an estimated 125,000 housing units immediately to drive down costs.
While the governor and legislators were negotiating the new legislation, more than 20 reporters and photographers for Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers traveled across the state to put faces on the people for whom the lack of housing is indeed an emergency rather than an abstract political problem. As the governor and legislators were congratulating themselves on the new bill, the report of the Hearst journalists was published, consisting of short profiles of a score of the state’s homeless.
The report made the legislation seem almost irrelevant.
About 800 people are estimated to be sleeping outdoors in Connecticut at any one time — on benches, in underbrush, in tents in woods, or under overpasses. Another 3,000 are said to be using homeless shelters. Many others are bouncing from motel rooms to cars to the couches of friends. Others are on the verge of eviction and soon to be homeless.
Just about any new housing will help a little. But the Hearst report showed that the problem of the homeless and the near-homeless goes far beyond the shortage of housing.
That’s because many if not most of the people who were profiled may be incapable of living on their own and supporting themselves under any circumstances. Many are mentally ill. Many have or are recovering from drug problems. Some have criminal records that hobble their chances of getting jobs and housing. Some have physical disabilities or are too old. Some are healthy but lack work skills. Some are generally incompetent. A few may be slackers. Then there are the homeless teenagers, parentless or runaways.
Social workers say 132 homeless people have died in Connecticut so far this year, their situations almost surely having been aggravated by homelessness.
State government’s emergency telephone line for help for the homeless isn’t always answered and is often of little help even when it is answered, since shelter space is so scarce.
With winter coming on, homeless shelters are where a serious response to the emergency should start, with shelters and barracks built urgently and managed and policed by state government. Connecticut has much vacant commercial real estate that could be converted quickly. There should always be a shelter with vacant cots and toilet and bathing facilities within easy driving distance from every point in the state.
Addressing the emergency should continue with state government’s construction and management of more “supportive housing,” studio apartment buildings with a medical clinic. They should be operated by state government like the town farms of old, with their tenants required to work to cover their rent and food. Nothing should be free except for the disabled, since perpetual welfare is demoralizing and people should accept their obligation to support themselves.
And then the state could use another mental hospital or two, since some people aren’t going to get better.
Not all the homeless are blameless. But all are still “the least of these my brethren” and so are owed a chance to get off the street.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 
Mansfield has two recently closed elementary schools, a closed state prison, and a closed campus for the former Mansfield Training School. Add to this the vacant low-income units in the massive 800-unit student housing complex.
LikeLike