Commentary—

No Room For Renters

By William A. Collins

No one likes,

The poor around;

Send them to,

Another town.

Perhaps the most devastating symptom of Connecticut’s growing income disparity is housing. Not only do rising rents price the poor out of the market, but soaring salaries make successful suburbanites even more protective of the purity of their own neighborhoods. Recently the Newington zoning board voted down in-law apartments, probably the simplest tool for increasing affordable shelter. You just never know who might move in next door when Blanche and Charlie’s grandma crosses the Great Divide.

Bottom line: As a society, we don’t much care about renters, let alone the homeless. They don’t pay property taxes (directly), they don’t vote much, they’re often nonwhite, they move around a lot, they’re lower income, their kids can be disruptive, and mostly they’re not like us. In other words, they depreciate the neighborhood.

For example, Americans have shown great sympathy for those new homeowners victimized by scoundrely mortgage lenders. We can identify with them. Like us, due to individual merit, they got their house. They transcended the trials of renterhood. We can bond with that. Those other guys out there, those still renting, being less deserving, are on their own.

They certainly are. They can’t deduct property taxes from the IRS, they can’t deduct mortgage interest, zoning is against them, condemnation is against them, and no one wants them in their community. Government and media are not their friends. For example in California’s “Inland Empire,” east of LA, some subprime home losers have gathered in a tent city under a highway overpass. Even so, they are now less interesting to the press than they recently were as owners. Still other evictees have gone back to apartments, driving up rents and forcing out their lower-income brethren, ultimately adding to the reservoir of homeless. Who cares?

There are, not surprisingly, additional causes of homelessness. Low pay is a big one; it’s been stagnant for years. Tearing down public housing is another — leaving fewer places for poor people to live. Then there is the shortage of psychiatric and social services, necessary to keep troubled people functioning in an ever more complicated and expensive society.

But the biggest segment of the housing shortage is simply that not enough apartments get built. Condos offer quicker turnover to builders. Offices promise a higher, if riskier return, plus no kids or pets. And stores bring fewer headaches.

Unfortunately, all this travail does not seem to unleash a self-correcting free market solution. Government is once again expected to do something, though without much support from voters. But luckily, moments of political opportunity do occasionally arise. Perhaps 2009 will be one. Surely, the new Congress will need to further beef up the minimum wage and to restore lost public housing units.

Likewise, states need to muscle their towns to zone more land for affordable dwellings. And the states themselves have unmet health, education and social service responsibilities, today universally in need of growth hormones.

Actually, perhaps it’s the towns that have the easiest job. No money needed. Just require that commercial developers add apartments to whatever else they’re building, and that subdivision and condo developers put some bucks into a kitty for subsidized units. Such are the hallmarks of civilized society.

But that’s not the trend. Lately a plan is even termed “progress” when a public housing project is torn down and a lesser number of mixed-income units take its place. This always results in more poor families with no chair to sit in when the music stops. Sure, it would be good to build those mixed-income units out in the suburbs, but no one is going to sit still for that. Instead, we’ll be lucky if the new federal administration simply improves wage laws and sustains public housing, if the states pony up for better social services, and if the towns liberalize zoning. Those simple, if unexpected, actions would constitute real progress.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)