Commentary—

Sensible Development May Be Impossible

By William A. Collins

Zoning laws are,

Such a breeze;

I build where,

I’d well please.

Everyone in Connecticut wants development conducted in a sensible and organized way. Everyone, that is, except property owners and taxpayers. If you control a chunk of land, you’d like to squeeze every nickel out of it that you can, no matter what those rigid bureaucrats down at town hall might have to say. And if you’re a taxpaying grunt, you want your town to bring in every office, factory, store, or lab that it can, to help share the financial load.

Historically in such conflicts between good planning and good money, money wins. That’s easy to see in Connecticut. Our open space is disappearing like shrimp at a cocktail party, and our highways are clogging up like exits at the ballpark. Likewise taxpayer passion to keep down the number of kids in local schools has led to a rash of large-lot zoning. This exclusionary touch pushes residential development ever farther out into farm and forest. There’s just no escape from remote new houses anymore.

But thusly spreading ourselves out across the countryside not only annihilates open space, it stations us too far apart to utilize mass transit. And further, with most towns seeking as many taxpaying employers as they can find, it means that jobs, too, are terribly scattered. This matrix virtually guarantees one man-one car commuting, not a good way to enter a world oil shortage.

One central cause of this “every town for itself” development tradition is our “every town for itself” tax tradition. More than almost any other state, we worship at the altar of local independence. It’s called “Home Rule.” Thus each town is free to totally govern its own development and to keep all the property taxes it can raise. No sharing.

Then, since the towns get so little financial help from the state, especially for education, they’re understandably eager to attract every new taxpaying building they can wheedle, beg, or bribe. For big ones, the state often ponies up most of the bribe money, but seems to care little about the project’s location. So much for planning.

And so it has come to pass that beyond our obvious land use and traffic catastrophes, this turning-a-blind-eye to development has caused a tax catastrophe as well. Property tax rates in Bridgeport, Hartford, New Britain, New Haven, Waterbury, and other desperately poor cities run three to four times those in the sleeker suburbs. After all, what investor will agree to build in those wretchedly taxed places? Not many.

Further poisoning the well is the simple fact that no town wants poor people. This is part of the reason for our ever-shrinking housing density rules. With fewer dwelling units allowed per acre, the price per unit goes up. In downtown, this means rents creep higher, and hopefully poor people won’t be able to afford them. That saves us money on schools and other social services, while forcing the poor into central city ghettos. Some towns have even taken to tearing down old public housing units and tenements as a way of purifying their populations.

Thus in our quintessentially capitalistic state, where every business, person, and town is encouraged to pursue its own self-interest, there is little chance for cooperation. We fiercely defend our right to develop any fool thing we please, and to keep all the profit for ourselves. That’s the Nutmeg way.

And since we’re a very rich state, who can argue with success? OK, so maybe our highway system is a nightmare, our towns harshly segregated, and our open space quickly becoming a mere memory. Freedom doesn’t come cheap, you know. But until corporations and rich people start moving away because of the congestion and worker shortage, our current unplanned system will only intensify. Get used to it.

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