There is no place for you in Newtown if you have a modest income. The houses are too expensive. Rentals are nonexistent. And the town has a set of zoning regulations designed for an affluent demographic that keeps the local population homogeneous and upscale. Fortunately, state law provides a reasonable alternative for developers to overcome the town’s resistance to providing affordable housing. The only problem with all of this, however, is that none of it is true.

The legislature’s Housing Committee conducted a hearing in New Haven February 5 on the state’s overreaching law that allows developers to sweep most local zoning regulations aside to construct high-density housing projects if they agree to make some of the residential units affordable for people who would otherwise be priced out of the local housing market. The panel heard from several people from Newtown, where officials have been struggling in recent years to calibrate local zoning regulations in a way that both provides housing opportunities for people with a range of incomes and protects the integrity of the local environment and the character of the town.

As Newtown’s Director of Planning George Benson pointed out at the hearing, the state’s current affordable housing legislation is being used to address a problem that the specific provisions the existing law artificially inflate. The 134 affordable units for senior citizens at Nunnawauk Meadows, for example, must be discounted by half in the town’s calculation for achieving the state goal of having ten percent of the local housing stock qualify as affordable housing. The relatively inexpensive units in the town’s three trailer parks are completely excluded from that calculation. Mr Benson also testified that the 16 percent of Newtown’s single-family residential housing stock that costs less than $200,000 is not deemed affordable by the state because it is not deed restricted.

In addition to attacking an artificially inflated problem, the current law allows developers to ignore local design standards like height and building setback restrictions and density formulas designed to protect wetlands, flood plains, and the overall environmental integrity of the building site. Apparently the state believes we should care enough to give people of modest means a place to live but not enough to sustain the same quality of life in their neighborhood accorded to the rest of the town. Fortunately, that is not the way Newtown is inclined to treat people.

We encourage state lawmakers to enact revisions to Connecticut’s affordable housing law introduced and supported by Newtown’s elected representatives that will recognize legitimate local efforts to provide a range of housing for citizens without eroding local zoning provisions that make a place livable in the first place.