Housing Panel Pitches Affordable ​“Registry”

Creating more affordable housing in New Haven is one challenge.

Making sure that low-income renters know where to find those below-market rent apartments is another.

Members of the city’s Affordable Housing Commission brought up that quandary — and put forward a potential solution — during the latest regular monthly meeting of the Board of Alders Legislation Committee. 

The virtual meeting took place online via Zoom last week, and was the first aldermanic committee meeting of the new two-year legislative term.

The relevant section of the meeting concerned the committee’s review of the 29-page New Haven Affordable Housing Commission Report and Recommendations October 2021, which the commission submitted to the Board of Alders late last year for review and discussion. The report and its recommendations derive from the first six months of work of the Affordable Housing Commission, which held its first meeting in April 2021 and which the alders voted to create in August 2019.

Click here to read that report in full.

The report itself includes a range of recommendations to the alders, from filling the remaining vacant seats on the commission to dedicating more federal pandemic-relief aid towards affordable homeownership programs to further researching the impact of the recently passed new ​“inclusionary zoning” law.

One of the focal points of Tuesday’s discussion was a recommendation by the commission that the city create a new Below-Market Rental (BMR) registry.

That is, a city-maintained running list of available local apartments renting out at prices that low- and medium-income New Haveners can afford.

“We thought it best not only for individual residents, but also for social agencies and housing advocates to actually have a place where they can go and see listings of affordable units throughout New Haven,” Affordable Housing Commission consultant Shancia Jarrett told the committee alders Tuesday.

Such BMR registry is ​“a place to start” for making sure that New Haveners in need of affordable places to live know where to look, Affordable Housing Commission and city public housing chief Karen DuBois-Walton said. Such a portal would ​“capture not just subsidized units through federal and state subsidies, but also … some naturally occurring affordable units, for which there’s really no good documentation” at the present time.

“It’s a very difficult process to be a renter in search of a unit,” she said. DuBois-Walton said that the ongoing local discussion around how to spend the flood of federal pandemic-relief dollars coming to the city presents the perfect opportunity to invest in this kind of BMR registry to help New Haven ​“get a handle on what’s happening in our [housing] market.”

The report itself goes into further detail on how such a BMR registry would work, and why it would help local low-income renters.

The report states that the average federally defined Fair Market Rent (FMR) for one-bedroom apartments in New Haven is around $1,181 per month, and $1,793 per month for three-bedroom apartments. Actual rental prices in New Haven far exceed those federal estimates, however, meaning that city residents often pay between $1,400 and $1,625 for a one-bedroom apartment, and between $1,800 to $2,016 for a three-bedroom apartment. Incomes, meanwhile, have struggled to keep up with rising rents.

“Municipalities throughout the country such as Stamford, San Carlos, Oakland, Cambridge, and San Francisco created Below Market Rate (BMR) programs to address the public’s access to affordable housing, to promote economic diversity, and enhance the social integrity of their cities by offering beneficial housing that fosters the health, safety, and welfare
of its residents and environment,” the report continues. 

“The creation of a BMR registry will not solve New Haven’s affordable housing crisis, but it will provide the public with access to affordable housing. It will also ensure that developers and leasing officers comply with Inclusionary Zoning requirements and HUD’s regulations for Low-Income Tax Credits, as well as make it possible to track the city’s progress towards making affordable housing accessible for all. For example, the city of Stamford’s BMR program includes over 250 affordable units, along with the contact information of leasing offices, and it has placed over 700 nonsubsidized households into affordable housing.”

Downtown Alder Eli Sabin asked Tuesday night about Stamford’s BMR registry.

Two hundred and fifty units listed on that registry ​“seems like a pretty small number of units,” Sabin said, especially in the context of New Haven’s housing market, which includes over 50,000 housing units.

“What can we do to make sure we got a bigger number of affordable housing options” listed on a New Haven registry, if the city decides to create such a list?

Jarrett said that that 250 number was just the number of apartments listed on the Stamford registry at the time that she reviewed it for the commission’s report. That number fluctuates based on which apartments are available to rent at any given time.

One way to ensure that New Haven’s prospective BMR registry has as many listed units as possible is to require that developers and landlords provide such information to the city, Jarrett continued. The new IZ law represents a prime opportunity to require landlords to list IZ-compliant units with the city after a building opens.

“New Haven is always saying it needs affordable units,” she said, often to the tune of 25,000-plus. ​“How are we going to know if we make that goal” without setting up a BMR registry?

Tuesday night’s BMR discussion was not about any specific proposed legislation, however. Rather, it was simply a review of the recommendations included in the Affordable Housing Commission’s report.

Accordingly, the committee alders voted unanimously to ​“read and file” the report — as they continue to mull over its recommendations for potential future legislation.

Click here, here, here, and here to review existing BMR registries in other municipalities that were linked to in the appendix of the Affordable Housing Commission report.