12/16/2023 0 Comments Brightview development![]() ![]() It’s an opportunity missed, said Erin Boggs, executive director of the Open Communities Alliance, an advocacy group based in Hartford. Even a subsidized market only goes so far. We’re in the hundreds or low thousands and the state needs some 130,000 new units of housing affordable to moderate income people, by most accounts. Trouble is, the numbers aren’t adding up. “There’s apprehension at first but once they see it, it goes away.” In all five towns where Metro Realty Group has built affordable housing, principal owner Geoffrey Sager said, new approvals have come after the first projects happen. One successful developer of affordable housing, fresh off an approval for 90 units in Farmington, said towns are coming around. ![]() “We’ve doubled the amount of investment we’re making in housing, doubled it,” Lamont said, adding that the push is for multi-family dwellings in downtowns, not large-acreage, single-family houses. Lamont, showing photos of attractive developments with modest rents, sees progress without tougher laws such as exposing towns to lawsuits, which advocates tried but failed to push through the legislature in each of the last two years. The core of the debate, unmentioned Friday, is whether the state needs legislation beyond the very loose and barely enforced rules (8-30g and 8-30j) that call for towns to create and supposedly enact plans for at least 10 percent of houses and apartments to count as “affordable” as measured by local median income levels. Or will Connecticut finally get serious about the stark divisions in where rich and poor people live? That would mean moving towns further than they want to go toward a mixed profile of housing - an idea that advocates say brings more sustainable economic growth. Does the state push for apartments and houses to suit a young workforce and a growing corps of active baby boomer retirees, letting towns pretty much decide who they’ll let in? That was the vision we heard at the 2035 conference led by Lamont and Mark Boughton, the state’s tax commissioner and infrastructure czar. How to get there, what to build and where? That’s the debate. The state has vowed to spend $800 million in bond money over the next couple of years and has cranked up a quasi-public agency known as the Municipal Redevelopment Authority, which will begin handing out grants to cities and towns in early 2024 to attract billions of dollars from developers. Everyone agrees it’s a linchpin to success. Housing that people can afford in walkable communities, that is. ![]() “We’ve gone from losing to winning…In the vision of where the state’s going to be, those moving vans are going to be coming to the state for a long time to come.”Īssuming we won’t see an 81-year-old Lamont in his fifth term in 2035, this is his legacy - returning Connecticut back to favor with economic growth, a youth movement and, you know, either a Sally’s or a Pepe’s pizza joint on every corner along with housing for everyone. “We’ve got to do everything we can to make this a place where people want to be,” Lamont said at a conference on infrastructure in 2035 at the Hartford Club, citing recent data - which might be flawed - showing an influx of residents. ![]() The good news: We have upwards of $8 billion in federal infrastructure cash coming our way, we’re outperforming most states on competitive grants and we have a boatload of state spending in the hopper for housing. Lamont, several of his top lieutenants and other optimists from around the state gathered to talk about what Connecticut will look like in 2035. Republicans call the electric vehicle scheme a dangerous path to calamity.Īnd that same year took center stage in Hartford Friday. Lamont, eagerly sticking by the plan under the California auto emissions rules, says the state will be ready. That’s the year, 2035, when Connecticut and a few other states would halt sales of new gasoline-powered vehicles - a point of heated debate. ![]()
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