New Haven Independent

James heads the Board of Aldermen’s Ad Hoc Committee on Strategies, Initiatives, and Alternatives to Preserve Affordable Housing. It formed over a year ago to work up legislative proposals to deal with the city’s high housing costs. The committee hired the consulting firm Holt, Wexler & Farnam, LLP, whose Jim Farnam met them Thursday to offer ideas for addressing the housing crunch — like legislating zoning breaks for developers who set some units aside for affordable rent, or families who want to add on separate “mother-in-law” apartments onto their houses.

Other ideas were to team up with not-for-profits who give classes to help families save, build good credit, and cut costs by doing their own maintenance once inside the door.

Committee members took away strategy sheets, and seemed in search of a specific, doable goal to move toward in next meetings. They’ve been tossing around something they informally call the “Yale Secretary plan” — an idea for a drive to secure affordable housing for people with, say, $40,000-a-year salaries, even while they’re still working to reach really struggling families.

Yale secretaries and cops and those people, at least, ought to be able to find housing in the city where they work, said East Rock Alderman Ed Mattison.

“We don’t want to be like Stamford,” agreed Hill Alderman Jorge Perez. “No cop can live in Stamford.”

Perez (at right in picture, next to Mattison) said that the way things are going in New Haven, only the Yale professors will able to afford to live in the city. “That’s not the city we want,” he said.

The aldermen didn’t seem surprised at charts showing housing sales prices in Newhallville, Fair Haven and the Hill to have more than doubled since 2001, and in Wooster Square, East Rock and Westville more like tripled. They were ready for the cost/wage-gap findings of studies like the one done by the economist Don Keppler-Smith of the New Haven-based Scillia, Dowling, & Natarelli Advisors. They’d seen the effects in their own neighborhoods.

Mattison said that where he lives, on Anderson Street in East Rock, it is plain to see rising costs “driving everybody out. We’re losing all the elderly — all the households without two incomes,” he said.

“Girlfriends are calling up old girlfriends, asking if they can stay for a while. It ends up being months and months,” said Hill and Dwight Alderwoman Dolores Colón. She said she used to live in the then-affordable not-for-profit-owned Trade Union Plaza, before it went private and expensive, and was among those worried not just about making affordable housing but keeping it affordable. “What are we going to do to replace places like Elm Haven and Brookside we demolished, and make sure prices don’t go right up like Trade Union Plaza?”

Alderwoman Jacqueline James said the committee under her watch would keep working together, with its hired consultant and with the city, in the name of those families for whom the market’s door was closed.

“That’s the main focus of our committee,” said James. “What are the solutions? What are some of the creative solutions for more affordable housing?”