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The latest question in New Haven’s affordable housing fight in Woodbridge: Do local housing hearings promote democracy? Or enable (mostly) white, wealthy homeowners to torpedo chances for change?
That question emerged during a three-and-a-half-hour-long meeting of the Woodbridge Town Planning & Zoning Commission. The virtual public hearing was held online via YouTube Live and Webex.
The meeting was the sixth public hearing in four months to focus on a rezoning proposal by civil-rights attorneys and Yale Law School students seeking to make it easier for developers to build multi-family affordable housing in Woodbridge.
The ongoing case has sparked the attention and participation of New Haveners interested in the regional roots of racism and segregation.
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Thursday night’s public hearing.
Towards the end of Thursday night’s hearing, after hours of detailed legal, technical, and engineering considerations of everything from Woodbridge’s current zoning map to the purviews of various state environmental regulators to the true capacity of on-site septic systems, Yale Law School student Patrick Holland got at what he described as “the heart of our application.”
He also articulated one of the most hotly contested issues in the current statewide debate around zoning reform and affordable housing.
That is: Are public hearings always, well, a good and productive part of of the process of determining the built environment of any given municipality?
Or, when required on a case by case basis for all new multi-family housing projects, are they too often co-opted by opponents able to scuttle each development entirely by screaming, “No!”
“Public hearings give power to a small portion of community members who can take advantage of the process to kill opportunity housing,” Holland said.
They do so by allowing a vocal minority — “disproportionately white, affluent, more often than not, male, and almost all homeowners” — to raise “pretextual” and “subjective” concerns around septic system design standards and the quality of traffic studies.
These arguments are often masks for subjective, personal animus against a particular type of housing coming to the neighborhood, he said. And they often work to stymie a development altogether by raising the financial and political costs for developers looking to do something new — like build multi-family housing in a single-family-dominated ‘burb like Woodbridge.
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The Woodbridge rezoning application pushed by Holland and his peers seeks to allow for the construction of multi-family housing “as of right” — that is, without a public hearing or site plan review by the town’s zoning commission — in any district in Woodbridge that currently allows for single-family housing by zoning permit only.
The proposed legislation would require that such multi-family housing comply with all of the current bulk and dimensional regulations that permitted single-family structures must abide by in order to receive such an administrative review.
“Without as-of-right permitting of multi-family housing, little to no affordable housing will be built” in Woodbridge, or any other similarly exclusive town, Holland said.
“No affordable housing plan can succeed if multi-family housing opponents are allowed a platform to deny permits on a case-by-case basis.”
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Holland’s line of argument Thursday repeats what his fellow civil rights attorneys and Yale Law School students have been stating throughout the Woodbridge rezoning case: that the public should have an opportunity to weigh in on housing and zoning policy changes, but not necessarily on every individual housing development.
It also tracks with testimony provided by Boston University political science associate professor Katherine Levine Einstein during a daylong public hearing before the state legislature on Monday. That hearing was all about a proposed statewide zoning reform bill that would make multi-family housing as of right in certain cases.
“My work shows that an as-of-right process [without a public hearing] is more equitable than our current process, which privileges the voices of advantaged, older, white homeowners,” the CT Mirror’s Jaqueline Rabe Thomas quotes Einstein as saying during Monday’s state legislative public hearing. “Planning and zoning board meetings triggered by the special permit/variance process amplify the voices of an unrepresentative group overwhelmingly opposed to the construction of new housing.”
Holland referenced Einstein directly during his argument Thursday night, citing her and co-authors David Glick’s and Maxwell Palmer’s 2019 book, Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis.
The Woodbridge rezoning amendment goes further than the proposed state law, however. While the latter would establish as-of-right zoning status for multi-family housing within a quarter-mile of a “main street corridor” or within a half-mile of a “municipality’s primary transit station,” the Woodbridge proposal would make multi-family housing as of right in any residential district in town that currently favors single-family construction.
“Woodbridge’s long and continuing history of exclusionary zoning has fueled Connecticut’s segregation and affordability crises,” said fellow Yale Law School student Hannah Abelow on Thursday night.
Allowing multi-family housing as-of-right across town represents a “first catalytic step in a longer remedial process” necessary to open up the leafy suburb to more economically and racially diverse populations.
She stressed that the rezoning proposal requires multi-family homes to meet all of the same size, setback, and public health mandates as current single-family homes, which are permitted as-of-right.
“The house is the same. The lot is the same. The only difference is that there will be other families living in the same house.”
Yale Law School student Karen Anderson agreed. She said that over-relying on public feedback from people who already live in a segregated town will almost never to lead to substantive change on long-standing issues around housing access and affordability.
“When you have a select group of people included in a segregated community, and then give them effective veto power” over a proposal like this one, she said, “that’s a recipe for continued segregation and exclusion.”
Critics: “One-Size-Fits-All” Approach Won’t Work
Thomas Breen pre-pandemic photo
Tim Herbst: Don’t overwhelm the zoning enforcement officers.
In their own separate testimonies Thursday night, Orange-based attorney Tim Herbst and Woodbridge-hired planning consultant Glenn Chalder described the potential pitfalls of removing multi-family housing projects from the purview of the town zoning commission.
Making such projects as of right in all cases could place too much of a burden on a town’s zoning enforcement officer to determine whether or not an individual housing development might endanger a public supply watershed, Chalder said. Given how much of Woodbridge falls into such an environmentally vulnerable category, that could prove dangerous to water quality for the town and the surrounding region.
The South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority submitted a letter to the commission hitting on this very concern, he said. Considering the relative vulnerability of Woodbridge’s water supply to potential contamination by overdevelopment, he said, the regional water authority would like opportunities to weigh in on individual construction projects — and the town zoning commission currently operates as a necessary sound board for the regional water authority to express its concerns publicly.
“They don’t want to be regulators themselves. They want to provide comments to the commission, have the applicants respond, then move ahead,” Chalder said. Leaning too much on a town’s zoning enforcement agent to make such water-supply determinations could be “too big a burden.”
And after reviewing each of the town’s different residential districts in detail, Chalder said, “The applicants applied with a regulation which is kind of one-size-fits-all for the zoning districts in town. [Those zoning districts] actually have different attributes, some of which complicate the questions before the commission.”
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For their part, the Yale Law students speaking in favor of the proposed rezoning update rebutted Chalder’s concerns by detailing the manifold regulatory agencies already in place that would protect vulnerable environmental resources from the potential harms of overdevelopment. Those include the Inland Wetlands Agency, the Quinnipiack Valley Health District, the state Department of Public Health, and the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP). They also responded to each of the concerns raised by the Regional Water Authority letter and argued that such an agency still would have a say on the impacts of multi-family developments, even under their rezoning proposal.
During his time at the virtual microphone, Herbst, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate and land use attorney who is representing roughly a dozen Woodbridge residents opposed to the rezoning proposal, asked Chalder if he had ever seen in any town he’s ever worked in a zoning proposal like this one.
That is, a rezoning proposal would affect “90 to 95 percent” of the town’s land mass, and would require just a zoning permit, and no site plan review or public hearing, for multi-family developments.
Some towns have adopted town-wide regulations that permit accessory dwelling units (ADUs) as of right, Chalder said.
“Most towns that develop affordable housing regulations codify certain site plan review standards, special exception review standards, special permit review standards,” rather than allow such projects by zoning permit only, correct? Herbst attacked.
Chalder said that, indeed, he’s aware of “numerous examples around individual housing projects [in which] the basic parameters of that development are spelled out as part of a regulation.”
And do you think a town zoning enforcement officer is qualified to make a determination by himself or herself as to a development’s potential impact on a public supply watershed when issuing a zoning permit? Is this too much of a burden placed on that one municipal employee?
Chalder said that the way the state set up statute 8 – 3(i) “was to give opportunities for dialogue to take place about the unique circumstances of a particular site, the unique circumstances of a particular development, and give the commission opportunity to weigh in on that.”
See below for previous coverage of this Woodbridge rezoning proposal.
• Urban Lawyer/Suburban Zoner Seeks Right “Balance” In Housing Controversy
• Open-Housing Debate: Define Racism
• Open-Housing Quest Critics Champion Local Control
• Suburban Zoning Debate Gets Personal
• City, ‘Burb Clash On Open-Housing Quest
• Urban Housing Lauded; Suburbs Challenged
More info on related issues, organizations:
Learn:
• New Haven LCI Fair Housing Division
• Connecticut Fair Housing Center
• A Push for Zoning Reform in Connecticut
• Preventing Displacement: Three Approaches to Protect New Haven Residents
• HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity
• The Neighborhoods We Will Not Share
Act:
• Desegregate CT
• National Fair Housing Alliance
• Fair Housing Foundation
This is an election year, and the lack of affordable housing is a non-issue that is being used to divert attention from the real issue - A 7.75% tax hike. Can we please re-focus on the important stuff. After all, an expensive house today will become an unaffordable house come July 1st when taxes go up.