Housing: Where We Grow From Here

As part of its continuing update of the 2004 Town Plan of Conservation and Development (POCD), the Planning and Zoning Commission has taken up a draft report on local housing prepared by a commission subcommittee and the town’s land use office. The commission is obligated by state statute to ensure that its main planning document includes provides for a range of housing opportunities, including multifamily dwellings and other alternatives to traditional suburban large-lot, single-family detached dwelling development. The idea is to provide diverse housing options for a diverse population. That is the concept. The reality is that the natural dynamic of an affluent town’s housing market is to price homes as high as the market will sustain, which in boom times makes buying a home in Newtown a pricey proposition that excludes most residents of modest means.

Boom times, as we are all painfully aware, are just a fading memory at this point. The local real estate market since 2008 has slowed to a crawl relative to the bubble market of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which followed on the heals of a steady and strong period of development reaching all the way back to the 1960s. (The report notes that in the 50 years between 1960 and 2010 — just one-sixth of the town’s 300 year history — 66.4 percent of Newtown’s housing stock was constructed.) Most of that development was single-family detached homes built on large lots in subdivisions. That kind of housing development in Newtown, however, may be a thing of the past. The draft housing report notes that in 2012, new applications for subdivisions were “essentially nonexistent.” The report anticipates that locally “future housing development will be on smaller lots and/or multifamily structures,” which means higher housing density — and perhaps lower housing prices within the reach of young families just starting out and senior citizens living on fixed incomes.

To be sure, higher housing density has its down side. We have all seen what the intense development of land has done to urban and exurban areas in Connecticut, where the roads are clogged, groundwater is polluted, tax rates are exploding, and scenic vistas are nonexistent. The challenge facing the Planning and Zoning Commission and the town as a whole is to reap the economic and social benefits of diverse housing options without ruining the fundamental quality-of-life advantages that have drawn new people to Newtown since its inception.

The town’s regulations allowing open space conservation subdivisions — otherwise known as cluster housing — which have been sitting unused on the books for years, were revised late last year to make them more developer-friendly. By trading housing density bonuses for open space preservation, the regulations seek to maximize benefits for developers, conservationists, and homeowners.

This current period of dormancy in local housing development will not last forever; when the market for new houses wakes up, we hope the P&Z and other local regulatory boards are prepared to both facilitate that development and protect the town’s natural resources and its celebrated “character.” In setting a course for residential development in Newtown’s future through changes in the POCD and its regulations, we hope the Planning and Zoning Commission continues to strike the kind of balance that both welcomes a new and diverse population and safeguards the many attractive reasons they chose Newtown in the first place.