In Connecticut, we have a housing crisis and we need to wake up to this reality.
Statewide we used to have about 20,000 homes for sale during the spring and summer buying season, now we have less than 5,000.
Try to buy a home today in the greater Hartford region, a region of 600,000 people in the roughly 10 mile radius from the city center. You’ll find just 416 total homes at any price point for sale at the time of writing. In the whole of Fairfield County (960,000 population) there are just 483 homes for sale for less than $600,000. There are functionally no homes to purchase.
But what of those who are comfortable in already owning their homes? Well they are trapped too. Unable to move to take advantage of job opportunities, size up to accommodate a growing family, or downsize into a more walkable place as they age. In short, the current housing market is failing everyone.
Just how severe is our housing crisis? Turns out it is worse than even I thought, the recently completed analysis by ECONorthwest found a total housing shortage of 379,000 homes. The scale of this shortage is immense and admittedly hard to fathom. What this means practically is our state with just over 1.5 million homes today, only has 80% of the homes a natural unconstrained market would provide. This shortage has cost our state a full federal representative in Congress.
Our current annual home permitting rate in Connecticut is between 5,000 and 6,000 homes. It would take about 63 years to permit our way out of this crisis at our current rate, without any new growth over that time. You’ll hear opponents of building housing deflect and point to “the five L’s” of home building in a well rehearsed dance. Labor, Lending, Lumber, Lots, and Laws/Regulations. While a nice deflection, the first four matter little if getting government approval to build a new home is nearly impossible.
I spent the better part of a year tracking housing denials across the state of Connecticut and over the last two years our towns denied no fewer than 8,000 homes, roughly 40% of all homes proposed in our state end up being denied.
Let me share a few examples of what “local control” looks like in practice:
- Newtown: Between 2022-2025 has denied 853 homes during the permitting process including a proposal to provide housing to 172 of our seniors. This session their state delegation snuck through a rat which strips the ability to ever develop housing on that site again. Meanwhile the first selectman sent a letter to our governor that stated: “Newtown has a long history of responsible and community driven land use policy.” – Responsible to whom?
- Enfield: Recently negotiated with a builder to eliminate 53 homes in order to add 20 parking spaces near the soon-to-be-completed Enfield train station paid for at great state taxpayer expense.
- New Canaan: Invented new fire safety regulations to deny housing; turning away 102 homes for lack of a third staircase (state building code explicitly requires two) and another 93 homes for insufficient driveway width at only 20 feet (town regulations explicitly require a 20 foot driveway).
- Newington: To this day has refused to update its zoning code to legalize incremental housing adjacent to its two Fastrak bus stations. Instead of our investment in the nation’s leading bus rapid transit system resulting in a dynamic new community forming, a transit adjacent car wash was recently constructed at the Cedar Street station. Why? Because it was legal to build while housing was not.
These are just a fraction of the thousands of homes lost during the permitting process here in Connecticut. The price of lumber and labor is immaterial if a builder is unable to secure building permits in a reasonable timeframe and at a reasonable cost. Is this level of nanny state micromanaging really making our lives better?
There is only one way out of our housing crisis, to build more housing and a lot of it. HB 5002 is the gentle path. It empowers towns to take the housing crisis seriously and plan for solutions while setting some reasonable guideposts for planning good practice. For instance, parking reform is a common sense way to add flexibility to new projects by reducing the spatial and financial cost of new development.
An example is in Trumbull, today to add an in-law suite for your aging parents to your single-family home (a second kitchen and a lockable door) you’d need to provide for four (Yes! Four!) additional parking spaces. These parking mandates are often designed to block projects rather than meet true parking demand – plus they are terrible for our environment. It is time to evolve beyond them.
We used to permit over 20,000 homes annually in the Nutmeg state, I believe not only that we can, but that we must return to this level of permitting. Our state’s future is dependent on our leaders taking this stand, HB5002 is an appropriate step forward.
Casey Moran lives in Hartford and co-founded ctparkingreform.org.