CT's housing crisis is bleeding into 2025. From homelessness to development, can lawmakers fix it?

With vacancy rates low, rents high, home-ownership out of reach for many residents and homelessness rising year after year, Connecticut clearly has a housing problem.

The question, posed annually around this time, is what state lawmakers might do about it.

In recent years, Connecticut’s legislature has considered sweeping proposals to reshape housing policy in the state, only to land on more modest solutions. This has increasingly irked advocates, who say the state is short more than 98,000 affordable rental units.

“It’s frustrating that everybody — in the legislature, in the governor’s office — says the right things about this, seems to understand the implications for the economy, for the environment, but when it gets right down to trying to do even incremental things, there’s still resistance,” said Peter Harrison, Connecticut director of the pro-housing Regional Plan Association.

Will this year be different? Ahead of the legislative session that starts Jan. 8, the dynamics appear largely the same: Many advocates and Democratic lawmakers want to see more housing in more places, while other Democrats and most Republicans are hesitant to impose on towns’ local control.

Meanwhile, tenant groups continue to push for greater protections for renters but have met resistance from landlords.

House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, said the legislature will likely revisit some previous proposals this year while also looking into some new ones, such as promoting the creation of more public housing. Speaker of the House Matt Ritter has said lawmakers are at work on a large housing bill that will be a priority for his caucus.

Rojas, who has described Connecticut’s progress on housing as “painfully incremental,” says now is the time to get serious.

“We have a crisis in the moment, and we’re going to have a crisis 10 years from now,” he said. “And it’ll be worse if we don’t act now.”

Here are some items that may be on the legislature’s agenda.

Zoning reform consistently ranks among the most hotly debated subjects at the Capitol. 

On one side are advocates and lawmakers who want to solve Connecticut’s housing shortage by compelling municipalities to relax their zoning regulations. On the other side stand lawmakers and local officials who want zoning decisions to be left to towns, without state involvement.

A proposal known as “Fair Share” that would assign each town a number of units could return in some form after failing to pass several years in a row, though the legislature is still waiting for the results of a study that Rojas said will guide next steps.

“I don’t know if we need to call it something different, because it’s such a politically loaded (phrase),” Rojas said of the “Fair Share” concept. “But I just hope people can get over words and actually focus on policy.”

Open Communities Alliance, an advocacy group that supports zoning reform, said its signature policy this year will be called “Towns Take the Lead.” It will be similar to “Fair Share,” executive director Erin Boggs said, but with a different, less demanding metric for judging compliance.

“In ‘Fair Share,’ towns’ success was judged based on the number of units that ultimately ended up being built in the town,” Boggs said. “In this proposal, towns are simply judged on whether they made a plan that targets a certain number of units and changed their zoning to match up with the plan.”

Rojas said Democratic leadership is unlikely to seriously consider changes to 8-30g, a polarizing law that allows developers to challenge communities that reject proposals for affordable housing.

Gov. Ned Lamont, a proudly moderate Democrat, has been hesitant to endorse major statewide zoning reform, urging — and sometimes incentivizing — towns to build more housing on their own. 

The major housing bill perhaps most likely to pass in 2025 is known as “Work, Live, Ride,” which offers priority for state funds to towns that create housing districts near transportation options.

The proposal, an example of what advocates call “transit-oriented development,” passed the state House of Representatives last spring 90-61 but never came up for a vote in the state Senate.

Asked what housing policies Lamont will support during the upcoming session, spokesperson Julia Bergman alluded to the transit-based concept, saying in a statement that the administration “will continue to look at ways to incentivize the development of more housing that is both affordable and market-rate and in areas that are connected to public transit.”

Harrison said he expects “Work, Live, Ride” to have broad appeal again this year.

“The whole beauty of ‘Work, Live, Ride’ is we’re just trying to make existing funding more efficient,” Harrison said, “which I think is why the governor and a lot of legislators have come on board for it.”

Though “Work, Live, Ride” would be unlikely to transform Connecticut’s housing landscape in the short-term, Harrison said he hopes it set the state in a more transit-oriented direction.

“We’re in a sprawl framework right now: it’s big lots, car-centric, low density,” Harrison said. “And ‘Work, Live Ride’ is a really significant down payment on breaking from that and embracing a post-sprawl framework.”

A year ago, lawmakers considered a bill that would have banned landlords from evicting tenants at the end of their leases without “just cause” but ultimately failed to pass it.

Luke Melonakos-Harrison, political director of the Connecticut Tenants Union, said the group will push that proposal again, in hopes that it will become law in some form. Melonakos-Harrison said he’d like to see lawmakers consider a broader bill than the compromise that nearly passed last year, which would have covered only renters in apartments with five or more units and only those who have lived in their homes more than a year.

“If that version of the bill is what gets introduced, that’s going to leave out about 50% of renters in the state who live in smaller buildings,” Melonakos-Harrison said. “So we’re going to be continuing to push for full coverage for all building sizes, other than owner-occupied.” 

Additionally, Melonakos-Harrison said the Connecticut Tenants Union will advocate for a bill that would allow tenants the first opportunity to purchase their buildings if their landlords choose to put them up for sale. The legislature could also consider a proposal to bar landlords from considering a prospective tenant’s criminal record.

The Connecticut Tenants Union will not push to cap rents statewide, as they have in the past, choosing instead to focus fully one eviction protections.

Rojas said he expects the “just cause” eviction debate to return, likely building on the compromise legislators moved toward near the end of last year’s session.

While many of these issues will be returning after years of debate and discussion, Rojas said he’s ready to start a conversation around something Connecticut hasn’t invested much in recently: public housing.

“I’m particularly focused on, how do we allocate more resources for public housing?” Rojas said. “I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re never going to meet the needs of the people at the lowest end of the spectrum. The market is not going to meet this demand.”

Rojas said the state could accomplish this by directing funds toward local public housing authorities, thereby creating new affordable housing while maintaining the framework of “local control” that animates many Republicans.

Once a staple of American housing policy, public housing has largely fallen from favor after decades of disinvestment left many large projects to wither. Today, a growing number of advocates and lawmakers nationally argue it’s time for another try.

“Let’s just not repeat what we did last time,” Rojas said. “There’s still very much a public good to come out of public housing, especially for meeting the needs of the lowest income.”

Boggs said she supports promoting public housing but worries that doing so only through local public housing authorities would result in affordable housing being built primarily in areas that are already more densely populated.

“If you don’t also give a lot of money to the state Department of Housing, you can end up reinforcing lines of segregation,” she said.

As of January 2024, more than 3,400 people were experiencing homelessness in Connecticut, up 13% from the year prior. In fact, homelessness in the state has increased three straight years, and advocates see no indication that trend is ebbing.

To address the issue, the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness is asking the legislature for $33.5 million in the coming fiscal year to fund eviction prevention, rental assistance, homelessness response services and case management for permanent supportive housing.

“The homeless response system’s ability to provide life-saving services is at risk due to critical funding gaps,” said Sarah Fox, the coalition’s CEO. “Because we don’t have ongoing, annualized funding for many of our key programs, that leaves our system and our providers very strained.”

Fox said the state currently has more unsheltered people than it has beds in warming centers, leaving as many as 200 people at risk of freezing on cold nights.

In addition to money for services, Fox said the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness will advocate for the creation of an interagency task force on homelessness and for policies that will increase the amount of affordable housing in the state.

“We know that it’s become increasingly difficult to find housing,” Fox said. “And especially for those who are low-income.”

As Lamont and other lawmakers have resisted mandates that would require towns to build housing, they’ve sought to use carrots to incentivize more development and help people seeking to buy homes.

Accordingly, Connecticut has devoted tens of millions in bonding dollars to subsidize developers who build low- or middle-income housing and to provide down payment assistance for first-time home-buyers.

Lamont has often touted these initiatives, including during in his State of the State speech last year, when he described successes in Connecticut’s development model and asked, “Why reinvent the wheel?” with new, more heavy-handed approaches.

Others, though, argue subsidizing development is inefficient and the state could save money by addressing the housing shortage through zoning instead.

“We’re spending a whole lot more money than we otherwise need to,” Rojas said. “If towns and cities just relaxed some zoning regulations and allow the marketplace to respond to demand, we probably would spend less money and have fewer legal issues at the local level.”

Hugh Bailey, policy director for the Open Communities Alliance, said that argument should resonate with lawmakers at a time when the state budget may be tight.

“There’s all this talk about ‘fiscal guardrails‘ and how expensive everything is. Zoning reform is not in that category,” Bailey said. “You can change zoning today, and it doesn’t have to cost the kind of price tags that we see for other proposals.”