Thomas Breen file photo
New market-rate housing on Howe Street: New Haven still needs supply for low- and high-income renters alike.
Rehab old housing stock.
Support new apartments for low- and high-income renters alike.
Find some way to contain, and outpace, the persistent expansion of megalandlords.
And stop pretending that New Haven’s affordable housing crisis can be solved by New Haven alone.
Those takeaways emerged from an hour-long discussion at the latest regular monthly meeting of the city’s Affordable Housing Commission.
The virtual meeting was held Wednesday evening via Zoom.
The catalyst for the discussion was state law 8 – 30j, which requires all Connecticut municipalities to adopt their own five-year local affordable housing plans by June 1, 2022.
To help New Haven meet that early-summer deadline, planners from the South Central Regional Council of Governments (SCRCOG) and the Boston-based consultancy RKG Associates attended Wednesday’s meeting to present some high-level data on New Haven’s housing market.
They also asked commissioners for their thoughts on the most pressing housing-related issues currently facing the Elm City.
They now plan on incorporating that feedback into a draft affordable housing plan to be provided to the city by April. New Haven’s local government will then have two months to host its own public hearing process around that document before adopting a final five-year plan by June.
“We don’t want New Haven’s affordable housing plan to be driven by SCRCOG staff or RKG,” principal consultant Eric Halvorsen said at the top of Wednesday’s meeting. The plan should instead be driven by the ideas and goals of New Haveners themselves. “Everyone is getting their own individual plans,” he said about the state’s 169 different towns and cities.
Don't Forget About The 'Burbs
RKG graphs
Halvorsen’s subsequent presentation was indeed chock full of New Haven-specific data. Including these data points:
• 72 percent of city residents are renters.
• Median home sale prices increased by over $100,000 over the past six years.
• 32 percent of New Haven’s housing stock is currently deemed by the state to be “affordable.”
• The city has 8,300 too-few housing units for its lowest-income renters and 3,200 too-few units for its highest-income renters.
Affordable Housing Commissioner Anika Singh Lemar argued the the very framing of this presentation — and of the 8 – 30j affordable housing plan law — around municipality-specific needs and goals gets at one of the largest challenges facing New Haven: The fact that housing markets are regional.
Regardless of what 8 – 30j says, “in order to comply with 8 – 2 generally, the individual town plans ought to recognize each town’s obligation to accommodate its share of regional need,” she wrote in the Zoom chat.
Thomas Breen file photo
Commissioner Anika Singh Lemar.
Singh Lemar said her critique was not of RKG’s presentation in particular, or of any one individual who showed up to present Wednesday night.
Rather, “for way too long, we have been addressing housing policy in a completely ass-backward way. where we pretend that one town at a time can solve a problem that’s a state-level problem.”
New Haveners in need of more affordable places to live aren’t just looking within city limits for that housing, she said. The problem is that the suburbs aren’t building enough to meet the regional demand.
As evidenced by the explosion of new housing permits issued in New Haven over the past two decades (see above), Singh Lemar continued, “we’ve really been doing our part in terms of creating units. And we just get screwed over by the fact that the other towns in the region don’t do anything.”
New Haven has added plenty of multi-family, close-to-transit, non-age-restricted housing to its residential market in recent years. And yet, she said, she fears “we’re not going to see the benefits of it in price-stabilization impact” because of the dearth of affordable housing construction in the suburbs.
Fellow Affordable Housing Commissioner Serena Neal-Sanjurjo agreed.
“We have done a lot of planning and a lot of studying over the last 10 years in terms of where we are today,” she said. “But our housing market, our housing will continue to be impacted by what’s happening in the region.”
All of those criticisms are well taken, affordable housing consultant David Fink said Wednesday night. “To the extent that we can encourage other towns to look at availing themselves of the options they have to create income-restricted units, we are doing that.”
But, he said, “we are limited in our ability to do that.” Because each municipality has its own zoning commission. And because Connecticut does not have county government.
“We are doing our very best because we care deeply about affordable housing creation in the region and we know the market is regional.” Nevertheless, “we want New Haven to shape its housing goals and not have them shaped by anyone else. … New Haven’s goals should be created by the people of New Haven.”
Old Housing & Megalandlords
Thomas Breen file photo
Commissioner Serena Neal-Sanjurjo.
Given the local-focused mandate of 8 – 30j, what are some New Haven-specific issues and goals around housing?
“We have a rehabilitation issue,” Singh Lemar said. “We have very old housing stock. … We have a problem which is how to get older housing stock up in terms of quality.”
That dovetails with a parallel problem of who exactly is buying up a larger and larger share of these older homes.
“As Anika said, we have very old housing stock,” Neal-Sanjurjo said. “We have a set of individual private owners, and not a whole lot of stock out there that we can actually renovate and rehab.”
So you’re still seeing out-of-town buyers swooping in en masse to buy New Haven housing? Fink asked.
“Very much so,” Neal-Sanjurjo replied. “It’s not stopped. I don’t think it’s going to stop anytime soon. There’s not a lot left out there for those of us” working to rebuild and stabilize neighborhoods on a block-by-block basis.
“It’s very difficult when [so many homes are] owned by outside developers and private markets that are not interested in doing redevelopment.” Neal-Sajurjo said city government and local economic development agencies are “looking every day for properties in specific neighborhoods, and before you even try to get it, it’s gone. Within a matter of hours, properties are taken.”
“Developer” is not quite the right word for who’s buying up so much of New Haven’s rental housing stock, Singh Lemar said.
Without citing any megalandlords by name, she said “they buy it but they do a cosmetic, slap-dash job, then they rent it out again. The problem is that the people who are doing the acquisitions are not the people interested in fixing up the properties.”
What about New Haven’s municipal housing code enforcement program? Fink asked. Does the city need to beef that up?
Neal-Sanjurjo, who ran the city’s Livable City Initiative (LCI) under former Mayor Toni Harp, said that New Haven has a “very robust program” for inspecting rental properties and enforcing housing code compliance. “At the same time, there’s a lot of inventory that has to be monitored, evaluated, inspected. Thousands [of units] a year they do. It’s a lot, because so many of the properties that used to be owner-occupied are no longer-owned occupied. They’re all rentals. You have entire blocks in neighborhoods that are all rentals.”
Affordable Housing Commissioner Claudette Kidd asked if SCRCOG and the consultants would recommend that the city invest more in expanding its housing code inspection program.
“My experience in cities is: It’s a Catch 22,” Fink said. “If you find violations, you can’t ignore them.” That means the city has to tell a landlord to fix those problems. And if the landlord refuses to do so, “your only recourse is to condemn the property” and take the landlord to court. That can lead to a landlord abandoning a property altogether, taking housing units out of the market and pushing families out onto the street.
"There Is Trickle Down In The Housing Market"
Wednesday night's Affordable Housing Commission meeting.
Thus the importance of increasing the overall housing supply in New Haven, he said. “I am bullish on New Haven.”
If the city sees the construction of thousands upon thousands of more housing units, those apartments will likely be filled by renters in no time at all, he predicted. “If you could go up 30 stories in certain places, that would be great. I think a lot of developers would be happy for those density bonuses.”
“Given what I know about it,” he continued, “I would build as many units as I possibly could. I would not rely on [surrounding suburbs alone]. They’re never going to build the volume of units that are really going to deal with” the great regional need for affordable housing.
Do you have any recommendations for how to encourage people who work in New Haven to buy and rent homes in the city? asked Affordable Housing Commission consultant Shancia Jarrett.
Fink pointed to RKG’s research around how the city has too few housing units for low-income and high-income renters alike.
“I know you’re thinking: Why would we create higher-income units to solve our affordable housing crisis?” Fink said.
The reason is, he continued, that those higher-income people are not able to find enough apartments in their price range to rent.
“So what do they do? They rent and buy down.” They rent and buy housing units better suited for people earning 100, or 80, or 60 percent AMI.
“And they drive up the demand and price for those units. And who gets screwed? Sorry for the French. Who gets hurt? Low-income people.”
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, he said. “But there is trickle down in the housing market in that way.”
Fink makes a point that few have grasped. We need housing at all price levels, including market rate and subsidized.
Why? Richer potential residents (who would be "middle class" elsewhere in the state) are going to move into the city if they want. You can't stop them by stopping the construction of new buildings. They will end up in existing housing, renovated for them by for-profit investors. This will directly displace relatively poorer people.
Anyone can see that this has happened repeatedly across the country. "Progressives" organize to stop new developments, exulting that they have denied "developer profits" and "housing for the rich." Investors and owners of existing buildings then upgrade their housing stock to accommodate demand at higher rents/housing prices. Developer profits denied are speculator profits created. Poorer residents lose, quickly and brutally.