Trachten in the office: Fed up with people saying, "We have a crisis -- so all rules out the window; we can do whatever the fuck we want.”
If you’ve ever had to go before the Board of Zoning Appeals, you probably know Ben Trachten.
Trachten has over the past decade become the go-to land use attorney for people looking to build up the city in ways that require zoning relief. That could be anyone from out-of-state housing developers looking to build hundreds of homes with reduced parking requirements to neighbors looking to convert their too-tall garages into extra apartments. He served a stint as well as chair of the BZA.
If you’ve ever read an Independent zoning article, you also probably recognize his name. That’s because when he’s not busy unpacking New Haven’s zoning code for clients, he’s often doing the same work for readers trying to untangle legalese in order to understand the big picture surrounding economic development, housing stock, civic engagement.
Trachten, who started off his career decades ago as a litigator for some of the city’s largest local landlords, sat down with the Independent to talk about how he became New Haven’s de facto zoning pundit (though he rejected that title).
We met in his State Street basement office, from where his father, former BZA Chair Murray Trachten, also used to run the Trachten Law Firm. “We were such fucking degenerates,” Trachten said of himself and his dad. “We had a $1,000 robotic air scrubber to keep our ability to smoke cigarettes in here.”
“It was so bad, but the world has changed,” he added, pulling out a vape and taking a deep breath.
While plenty has indeed changed during the 46-year-old’s lifetime, including rental rates and zoning board members, some things, like the city’s outdated zoning code, stay stubbornly the same.
Sitting beside stacks of now digitized papers and pen ink drawings of local architectural fixtures by Hill-based artist Krikko Obbott, Trachten enumerated the ways zoning regs could be rewritten to build a better city. The New Haven native criticized those who claim a “crisis” and skirt laws as a means of catalyzing change — even as he lamented a lack of action by various administrations to make the kinds of simple amendments for which he’s long advocated.
Trachten II
Before following his father into a local zoning law dynasty, Trachten “tried everything to get away from New Haven” as a teenager.
When his father, who served as chair of the city’s zoning board, told Trachten anecdotes about his work, the Wilbur Cross student didn’t find arguments over small housing developments and billboard placements too scintillating.
“I was more interested in girlfriends and partying,” Trachten said.
Little did Trachten know that he would later choose to buy and raise his kids in the same Westville home where he grew up. Today he works out of the same office where his father last ran the Trachten Law Firm, and now he owns the business himself.
Trachten never ended up straying too far from New Haven itself. After graduating high school, he wound up attending Southern Connecticut State to study political science and interning at City Hall underneath New Haven’s chief administrative officer.
At the time, the city was convening a task force to confront the Year 2000 potential computer-crash problem.
“You can imagine how many city resources were devoted to the Y2K; it was shocking. It was justified in the moment, but then midnight Dec. 31, 1999, happened … and nothing else happened.”
“It speaks to how we think everything in the moment is a crisis, and then looking back it’s completely fucking meaningless. People resort to claiming crisis about all sorts of things, like housing. And people take extraordinary measures and do extraordinary things using the word ‘crisis’ or ‘emergency’ when in historical perspective, looking back, it might not be as dire as everybody thinks. We see a lot of reactive government these days, at the local, state and national level.”
His brother, Evan, would ultimately work for the city as a specialist with the Livable City Initiative. Ben ended up switching gears and attending Quinnipiac Law School. Once certified in real estate law, he joined his dad’s practice.
On his first day, Trachten said, he was thrown into housing court to help evict a slew of tenants. His dad pulled back to part-time hours during the 2008 financial crisis, at which point Trachten said he had to figure out how to keep the firm afloat.
He ended up representing local megalandlords in legal cases ripe for ethical unpacking. Trachten recalled one moment that has since shaped the way he uses his law license: “When I was going to court and doing somewhere around 200 evictions a year, I had a case where I showed up and it was a mother who brought her fifth- or sixth-grade son to the hearing. The son looked at me and said, ‘You’re Adam’s father.’ And I said, ‘Who are you?’ and he said he was my son’s classmate at Edgewood School. And I knew at that point I did not want to be evicting people anymore. It’s just too small of a community in New Haven. Evictions aren’t for me.”
Plus, Trachten said, when he takes on a client or project, he vets the integrity and intent of the applicant.
“Am I evil? No. Because I am always on the same side of the issue. You can’t hire me to oppose something that I supported for somebody else. I like to think there’s some consistency in the work that I do, in terms of its goals, its aims and the direction I want to see the city go in. I don’t take every case that comes through the door — I’m blessed to be able to say no to people.”
Anyone For 21st Century Zoning?
Trachten is able to say no to cases because he has already accrued an abundance of clients across New Haven, representing nearly every zoning relief application that comes across the appeal board’s radar.
Trachten credited a combination of hard work and institutional knowledge acquired through familial mentorship and hours spent governing the zoning board, engaging in local civic life (and in the comments section of the Independent), and working exclusively within New Haven.
“I work at least 80 hours a week. It’s not unusual for me to be answering emails at 4 in the morning,” he said, powered by breve cappuccinos, which he makes at home with half-and-half. When in dire need of caffeine at the office, he stops by Atticus Market in East Rock for that same order.
“Without people like me,” he argued, “there’s nobody to guide people through a very broken municipal land use approval system. We’re at a point in time where city staff is at its historic lowest headcount in my lifetime. It’s really impacted the need for someone like me, who’s been around this stuff since I was a kid, to say, ‘Hey, hold on, there’s another way to navigate this illegal garage or this site plan approval.’ ”
Trachten also has a lot of ideas about how to better New Haven’s approach to zoning.
First, he said, the city should start “streamlining” zoning applications. For example, he said, begin by eliminating small referrals and parking matters voted on by the BZA to the City Plan Commission, an extra step that can add months to projects that are typically granted with little controversy.
“It’s an additional cost burden, an additional staff burden, and there are already checks and balances like building permits built into the system.”
Another action Trachten has long lobbied for is rewriting the city’s zoning use table to “reflect 2023 uses and not 1963 uses.”
The Elicker administration has focused on how to produce more as-of-right, small-scale housing development like accessory dwelling units (a form of development that has gained little headway due to building code costs rather than zoning constraints). Trachten pointed out that the city already has tens of smoke shops, which are permitted as of right because they count as “news and tobacco use.”
“It recalls a time years ago when you had newspapers being sold every third or fourth block,” Trachten said. “And now you can have three or four smoke shops on the side of Chapel Street all as of right, without any scrutiny.”
Though the table lists uses that seem largely irrelevant today — like watchmaking — Trachten said the only edit that’s been made to the document in recent years has been to add yet another niche use: Cat cafes.
“Literally someone spent the staff time to go through a zoning ordinance to permit a cat cafe. This is the priority. I’ve suggested rational changes dozens of times and this is what we get.”
Rules Is Rules
Beyond his beliefs about how to alter the city’s codes and procedures, Trachten warned against overstating the magnitude of housing challenges when the city considers zoning decisions.
First, he argued, he can’t say that an affordable housing “crisis” really exists.
“I don’t have enough data to say,” he stated. “But I know you can still find a two-bedroom apartment for $1,000. It might not be in a neighborhood that’s easily walkable to downtown, but it’s still in the city and meets all city codes.”
“Housing is a regional issue,” he continued. “Nobody needs to live in New Haven. There’s always been consolidation of the multi-family market; it’s just different players.
“Yes, prices have gone up. But for many years New Haven’s housing was deeply underpriced. Fifteen years ago you could get a two-bedroom apartment for $600, while 60 miles away in New York City, you’re paying $3,000, certainly speaks to the undervalued nature of New Haven real estate.
“People recognized that. They came in here, they realized there was room to reset the market, and that’s why we have the pricing that we have. And I think it’s rational and I think it’s reflective of the actual value of housing. Housing is a commodity. And housing should be a commodity.”
That said, he urged that New Haven put effort into increasing density.
“It’s too expensive to build downtown,” he directed. “Go to the periphery of downtown, like the first couple blocks of Grand Avenue and Whalley. Keep doing what we’re already seeing in Dixwell already.”
The city should create a fund, he said, to help developers “eat the massive gulf” that exists between affordable and market rents. If the city wants to keep their inclusionary zoning ordinance, which requires all developments over a certain size to set aside 5 percent of rentals at a subsidized rate, keep those impositions low and help developers pay for the difference through tools like tax abatements.
Trachten was asked about the call by the Amistad Catholic Worker House to circumvent zoning codes in the name of providing immediate refuge for the homeless, in the form of a backyard encampment of tents, huts and tiny shelters.
“I visited the site. What I saw was exactly what is pictured in the New Haven Independent articles. To me it looks orderly, but in no way compliant. Those arrangements are inherently unsafe,” he said.
“There’s a reason why there’s a distance requirement between structures, and that’s fire safety. If there are adequate mitigating measures, come before the BZA and ask for relief, explain why your sprinkler system or your fire resistant sheetrock or your cinder block wall prevent this from being an issue.”
He took a moment to consider the other side: “Maybe if there’s one person sleeping outside, it is a crisis. It’s something that should be addressed.” But, he continued, “whether it’s a crisis that necessitates putting people’s lives in jeopardy with an unsafe array of structures and having a massive impact on a dense residential neighborhood is a whole other separate set of questions.”
“It’s an example of people saying, ‘We have a crisis — so all rules out the window; we can do whatever the fuck we want.’ We have a homelessness crisis, a housing crisis, an opioid crisis … Maybe we do, maybe we don’t. That’s not the issue. The issue is what process you follow to get to the use that you want. Do you follow the rules or just break all the rules in the name of a self-declared crisis, even if it’s legitimate.”
Ben and I periodically disagree. But he knows what he is talking about. And he does a great job in serving his clients, typically small-scale property owners.
Among our disagreements is whether there is enough data to say that there is a housing affordability crisis. According to Data Haven, which relies on Census data, 50% of New Haven renter households are cost burdened, i.e., spend more than 30% of their income on housing. (I agree with Ben that 30% is not a magic number. But it is the long-standing benchmark.) This is not just a city issue. Earlier Census data indicate that 51% of New Haven County renter households are cost-burdened. And 28% are severely cost-burdened. This means they pay half or more of their income on housing. https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2021/04/06/new_haven_county_housing_accessibility_and_affordability.pdf
Im sure Ben is right that there are some code-compliant two bedrooms for $1,000/month. The problem is that there are no where near enough such apartments, in New Haven or elsewhere in the region.
Ben is definitely right that the zoning ordinance is part of the reason for the lack of affordable housing. As the Independent has reported, the city has just begun the process of revising the Comprehensive Plan. The Plan is supposed to provide a framework for zoning. But while that process is going on, the city really should revise the Use Table and other outdated parts of the zoning ordinance. BTW, I have some friends that will be pleased to learn that dress-making, as well as watch-making, are among the home occupations you can practice as of right.