Making Affordable Housing Work

For Newtown

At a time when town agencies are scrounging for every last dollar, Newtown’s Planning and Zoning Commission has received a gift of $50,000 from above — the State of Connecticut, that is. The grant will pay for a study of the P&Z’s affordable housing policy, applicable regulations, and a review of local sites suitable for such high-density housing. Getting the money is great, but the real prize will be the knowledge and direction P&Z derives from this study over the next four months.

Affordable housing, or “incentive housing” as the state’s Office of Policy and Management is now calling it, has been endorsed in concept by Newtown’s Plan of Conservation and Development for years. That document long ago declared that it is not the intent or desire of Newtown to be exclusionary in its zoning practices. Aside from being a violation of state law, de facto economic restrictions on who may and may not live in a town are damaging to its social and economic culture.

Notwithstanding the good intentions, however, Newtown’s Planning and Zoning Commission has approved only two housing projects under its affordable housing regulations: the 49-unit Riverview Condominiums on Bryan Lane in 1997, which had 13 affordable units for sale; and the 24-unit River Walk on Washington Avenue in Sandy Hook Center in January this year, which has eight affordable units for sale or rent.

Twenty-one affordable housing units in a town of 27,000 people may seem like a token tip of the hat in the town’s professed earnest effort to offer a range of housing stock for a population with varied incomes. Part of the problem is that affordable housing projects are approved by special permit, which makes the process somewhat ad hoc in that the layers of review of such applications is not standardized but unique to a property. This is good in that it sets the bar high for high density housing proposals that threaten the environment, like the ill-fated Edona Commons proposal in Sandy Hook Center near Dayton Street. (Its rejection by P&Z is still under appeal in the state courts.) Yet the special permit process is daunting to developers who want to work in good faith with the town to provide affordable units as part of their housing projects. Consequently, few have tried to negotiate the rigorous review process.

One exception is Michael Burton’s River Walk project, a little to the south and east of the Edona Commons site in Sandy Hook Center. Unlike Edona Commons, the River Walk plan had the support of the residents and businesses in the area. Mr Burton worked with town and met all the tests applied by local regulators to the site. The project, which is on the verge of getting its final approval from the Water and Sewer Authority, makes the most of the interdependence of residents and businesses in the area — a relationship that should produce a benefit for the whole area that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The value of the $50,000 from the state and the study it pays for will come in identifying sites like River Walk where high density/lower cost housing makes sense not only to the developer’s accountant but to the town as a whole. Once those sites are identified, developers may be more willing to go through the affordable housing review process, knowing they will not be investing in a cause that it lost at the outset. And Newtown can make better progress in living up to the ideals outlined in its Plan of Conservation and Development.