nothin Zoning Debate Seeks Path To “Inclusion” | New Haven Independent

Zoning Debate Seeks Path To Inclusion”

File photos

Testifiers in IZ debate, top row: Lillie Chambers, Darren Seid, Kelcy Steele. Middle row: Anstress Farwell, Karen DuBois-Walton, Ben Trachten. Bottom row: Jaime Myers-McPhail, Myra Smith, Elias Estabrook.

In the view of people who spent hours offering testimony, the Elicker Administration’s plan to promote inclusionary zoning” is …

One of the most progressive land-use updates in the nation?

Too generous to developers, and too stingy to low-income renters?

Just another tool in the affordable-housing toolbox?

Bureaucratic overreach that will silence the city’s building boom?

All of the above?

Those arguments were advanced Tuesday night during a two-and-a-half-hour public hearing hosted by the Board of Alders Legislation Committee. The virtual meeting took place online via Zoom and YouTube Live.

The hearing concerned the city’s proposed inclusionary zoning” (aka IZ”) law.

The only vote taken by alders at the end of Tuesday’s meeting was to continue the matter to a future yet-to-be-determined date. If the proposal does make it out of committee, the full Board of Alders would then take the matter up for debate and a potential final vote.

If approved by the full Board of Alders, the law’s update to the zoning code would require developers to set aside affordable units in new and rehabbed apartment complexes citywide, with a focus downtown and on publicly-owned land.

The bill won the support of the City Plan Commission in July, when city officials and affordable housing advocates and local developers and land-use attorneys wrestled with many of the same questions about whether the proposed zoning change goes too far, not far enough, or is just right in encouraging more affordable housing while not stymying private investment.

Zoom

Tuesday night’s Legislation Committee hearing.

That debate resumed Tuesday night, as 19 members of the public testified during the hearing and over a dozen wrote in beforehand. A vast majority of those who weighed in urged the alders to pass some version of the inclusionary zoning law, even if they’d like to see changes to how it’s run and what levels of affordability would be required where.

We have a crisis of segregation in our city that is unjust and costs lives,” Beaver Hills resident, New Haven Rising organizer, and city Affordable Housing Commissioner Jaime Myers-McPhail said on Tuesday. Too many New Haveners spend too much on housing — and longtime city residents are struggling to make ends meet while luxury apartment developers get rich building new, expensive apartments downtown.

Inclusionary zoning is one tool that our city could implement to ensure that more residents have access to safe, affordable housing.”

Thomas Breen file photo

Legislation Committee Chair and East Rock Alder Charles Decker.

Legislation Committee Chair and East Rock Alder Charles Decker made clear at the top of Tuesday’s hearing that New Haveners will get at least one more chance to discuss and debate the proposed zoning change, at his aldermanic committee’s next meeting.

It’s a huge, complicated piece of potential legislation,” Decker said. It’s completely core to the [Board of Alders’] legislative agenda. I want to make sure that the public has ample time to testify.”

Click here to watch Tuesday’s meeting in full, and see below for more details on how the policy would work.

Supporters: The People Here Are Struggling”

City of New Haven image

The basics of IZ.

Members of the public who testified Tuesday night — either during the meeting itself or in advance via pre-submitted written testimony — were largely supportive of the idea of IZ, and critical of the details of how New Haven’s proposed policy will work.

Those who urged the alders to pass an inclusionary zoning law told story after story of their own experiences struggling to find an affordable place to live in the city they have long called home, and of the cognitive dissonance of seeing so many apartments — at such high rents — rising up all over downtown.

Beaver Hills resident and Affordable Housing Commissioner Rebecca Corbett spoke about how she found herself several decades ago stuck in an abusive relationship, living off of welfare, and desperately trying to find a safe, affordable place for her and her kids to live.

A union job at Yale helped her buy a home and achieve a stable, middle-class life, she said. I still live in fear that it could all go away in a minute. The trauma of not having a place to live for so long never goes away.” She said she worries that downtown’s boom in luxury and market-rate developments are rendering that part of the city exclusive to the wealthy. An inclusionary zoning law would help open up some of those developments to a more economically diverse group of renters, she said.

Yale University graduate student Jane Nichols spoke about moving from Illinois to New Haven. She was shocked at just how unaffordable New Haven is to people who don’t come from money and privilege. That’s not just because of high rents, Nichols said, but also landlord requirements that tenants sign a lease months before moving in — and that they pay a security deposit worth up to two months’ rent.

Nichols could afford to move into only a one-bedroom apartment with three roommates, no living area, and not enough space to have a bookshelf and a dresser in the same room. And that only worked out thanks to the generosity of a roommate, who helped cover the first month’s rent.

I do know that developers are not going to set anything aside that most New Haveners can afford unless the law says they have to,” Nichols said in support of IZ.

Rent limits by AMI.

Affordable Housing Commissioner and Newhallville resident Elias Estabrook spoke of growing up in Somerville, Mass. — and worrying that New Haven’s rising rents are quickly making the Elm City as unaffordable as his hometown has become. Rents in New Haven increased by 5 to 7 percent between 2020 and 2021, he said. That puts the average one-bedroom apartment rent at $1,600, he said. An average three-bedroom apartment in New Haven now costs more than $2,000 per month.

Everyone deserves to live in a safe home that provides and supports a good quality of life,” said native New Havener Beryl Benson. She spoke of the challenges of renting from a large, local corporate landlord” — including spending a recent holiday weekend without hot water because her landlord’s emergency maintenance crew was unavailable and unresponsive.

The people here are struggling,” said local Mothers and Others for Justice organizer Myra Smith. We want to stay here. We want to live here. We want to continue to raise our children here. But it has become impossible to live here.” Because of just how expensive New Haven housing costs have become.

Varick Memorial AME Zion Church Pastor Kelcy Steele agreed. We need more opportunities, better jobs, and more affordable housing in every neighborhood, but especially in formerly redlined neighborhoods like Dixwell,” he said. Our city is at a breaking point. … Developers, city leaders, and leaders of wealthy institutions have an obligation to partner with our communities to end decades of segregated development.”

Critics: Not Affordable Enough

Some of those who spoke up Tuesday, including Dixwell/Newhallville residents Lillie Chambers and Sinclair Williams, pleaded with the alders to require deeper levels of affordability than those currently laid out in the proposed IZ law.

Requiring only a 5 percent set-aside in downtown-adjacent neighborhoods like Newhallville means that 95 percent of those prospective new developments remains unaffordable,” Chambers said.

You can amend it. You can stop it. You have the power to do this,” she said. We want to be able to stay here. At the end of the day, we want New Haven built up, but not at the expense of the residents of New Haven.”

As a local legal aid attorney, Williams said, he talks on a daily basis with tenants — mostly single moms working multiple jobs — who call crying, begging, to have you do something to stop police from putting you and your children onto the street.” They can’t afford current rents in the city, he said, and fear being displaced by gentrification that may result from the raft of new luxury construction.

He urged the alders to increase the mandated affordable set-aside in downtown-adjacent neighborhoods like his to more than 5 percent. And to clearly define what the city’s affordable housing fund is, and how that money will be spent if developers decide to opt out of the IZ requirements.

Karen DuBois-Walton, who heads the city’s public housing authority, countered Fontana’s statement earlier in the night that the last thing the city wants to do is put a policy in place that dries up investment in the housing market.

The last thing we want to do is contribute to ongoing segregation,” she said. The last thing we want to do is make decisions today” that will make New Haven’s housing market even less affordable and more unequal 10 years down the road.

In her written testimony to the alders, which can be read in full here, she detailed changes she would like to see to the IZ proposal put forward by the Elicker Administration. Those include:

• Capping the rent charged to housing choice voucher (HCV)-reserved units to that charged for the 50 percent AMI affordable units, and requiring lease-up preference for families making between 0 and 30 percent AMI.

• Requiring that the proposal take into consideration the cost of utilities, and limiting rental costs — that is, housing plus utilities — to no more than 50 percent AMI in the deed-restricted affordable units.

• Ensuring that the developer incentives are not too generous, by increasing the in-lieu of fees, limiting the offered tax abatements, and pushing the mandatory affordable set-asides up to 30 percent of units in mixed income developments.

DuBois-Walton also took aim at the build build build idea that promoting the development of any type of housing will ultimately be to the benefit of all renters. Proponents of the unregulated growth of market rate units in the core and adjacent districts often promote the false narrative that the influx of new luxury units has the impact of creating more affordability in other rental stock,” she wrote. While this is often cited, it is not backed up with empirical nor subjective data. New Haven has been the recipient of hundreds of new market rate, luxury units over the past few years. No significant reductions in the city’s fair market rent have been noted and potential renters are currently experiencing great difficulty finding rental units in this market at a rent that they can afford.”

New Haven Urban Design League President Anstress Farwell urged the committee members to use an affordability level keyed to city, rather than regional, median incomes. She also called on the alders to put a temporary pause on the proposal and rethink some of its core elements, like its map and developer incentives.

In one way, we see so many developments going up with no affordable units, and we need to get in front of that. And time is of the essence,” she said. But I don’t think the proposal that’s before you tonight is ready to fly.”

Critics: Don’t Stifle Investment

The proposed new “inclusionary zoning overlay.”

New York City-based developer Darren Seid and, in the form of pre-submitted written testimony, local land-use attorney Ben Trachten, meanwhile, warned the alders that the IZ proposal as currently envisioned will likely ward off investors without helping renters most in need.

It’s a tough topic, and I am in support of the topic. I am in support of inclusionary zoning,” said Seid, whose company is behind hundreds of new and planned market-rate apartments in Wooster Square. I am not in support of the way it’s currently designed.”

He said he knows stories of policies coming out that just destroy investment in beautiful, blossoming cities.” New Haven’s IZ policy could do just that.

The affordable units that we are all discussing, they do not get built if the investment stops coming into town. They will not get built if people do not invest in the city and build free-market units as well.”

The only way to pay for affordable units is for developers and investors to make a profit on the units that they build,” he continued. That’s just how it is.”

In his written testimony to the committee, which can be read in full here, Trachten criticized the IZ policy as focusing on the wrong problem.

New Haven has plenty of affordable housing, particularly in comparison to other towns and cities in the region, he said. The real issue is poverty but no one wants to talk about that. Instead, we just keep trying to dump the responsibility of housing deeply poor people on market participants that have no expertise and no possibility of producing a successful outcome, private developers.”

He said that New Haven’s IZ policy does not include a municipal loan program that would help close the funding gap” that comes from the 99-year term of mandated affordability for these set-aside units. He said other municipalities, like Minneapolis, have adopted IZ policies with a rational approach, not some slapped together plan by a bunch of interns and consultants.”

And he raised concerns about the administrative burden” to arise from adopting such a complex and difficult-to-enforce policy.

As many commentators noted in recent articles on this proposal, the impact of this ordinance will be modest at best,” he wrote. At worst, it will chase off developers interested in doing solid market rate developments in New Haven to towns and cities that don’t have punitive inclusionary and affordable regulations.”

While the alders who spoke up Tuesday generally limited their line of questions to city staff to the minutiae of how the IZ policy would work, Fair Haven Heights Alder Rosa Ferraro-Santana tipped her hand on how wary she remains of the Elicker Administration proposal.

I’m gonna tell you right now: It’s not gonna work,” she said. I’ve seen it happen before, and the city did a horrible job in the past of reviewing compliance documents to ensure that the AMIs were reached.” Passing a law requiring certain levels of affordability is one thing, she said. Making sure that builders actually follow through and stick to those rules is another — and the difficulty of that enforcement should not be underestimated.

It is very difficult to keep developers in line,” she said, and to ensure that someone from the city to tracking their percentages of units that they’re giving. … If we’re going to do this, then someone needs to be in charge and they need to be held accountable. You can’t just leave it to a department. Someone needs to do checks and balances.”

How It Would Work

City Plan Director Aicha Woods.

How New Haven’s IZ law would work.

City Plan Director Aicha Woods, city Deputy Economic Development Administrator Steve Fontana, and city Livable City Initiative (LCI) Acting Executive Director Arlevia Samuel took the lead Tuesday night in explaining how exactly this law would work.

They did so while framing it again and again as a balanced measure that will not solve the city’s affordable housing crunch in and of itself, but will instead work alongside other municipal policies — like a recently adopted accessory dwelling unit (ADU) ordinance and the creation of a permanent Affordable Housing Commission — to promote a more affordable housing market citywide.

It’s just one tool that we can use in a whole range of tools,” Woods said.

This is a relatively small tool that we can pass to help to address housing affordability and availability in New Haven,” added Fontana. We shouldn’t allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good.”

Fontana also pointed out that, in order to work in promote new affordable housing and transforming the city’s existing market-rate-apartment book, the inclusionary zoning law still very much relies upon private investors continuing to put their money into New Haven’s housing market.

The last thing any of us wants is to see that investment decline or for us to discourage that investment,” he said. The last thing we want is to have housing development, and affordable housing development specifically, to diminish because of anything we might do.”

As currently envisioned, the proposed law would require:

• 20 percent of units in buildings 10 units and larger that are built on public land to be set aside for renters making no more than 50 percent of the area median income (AMI). That would mean rents for a two-bedroom apartment could not exceed $1,090 per month, based on the federal government’s 2019 AMI calculations for the New Haven-Meriden area.

• 15 percent of units in 10-unit-plus buildings that are built in the downtown Core” market to be set aside at deed-restricted affordable rents. That would include 10 percent at 50 percent AMI, and 5 percent for Section 8 vouchers.

• 5 percent of units in 10-unit-plus buildings that are built in the downtown-adjacent Strong” market to be set aside at 50 percent AMI.

• 5 percent of units in 75-unit-plus buildings that are built everywhere else in the city to be set aside at 50 percent AMI.

The law would also require inclusionary” apartments to remain affordable for a term of 99 years; it would allow developers to pay between $168,000 and $225,000 per unit into a city-managed affordable housing fund to buy their way out of the IZ requirements; and it would provide a host of incentives, from density bonuses to waived parking minimums to tax abatements, to sweeten the deal for participating builders.

Samuel said that either LCI or a city-hired contractor will be responsible for enforcing landlord compliance with the various IZ rules. Non-compliance could result in punishments ranging from fines to revoked building permits.

New Haven’s policy is really unique in that it targets that deeper level of affordability,” Woods said, pointing out how city-hired consultants found that most IZ policies across the country focus on the 60 to 120 percent AMI range — while New Haven’s focuses on 50 percent AMI.

We are one of the most progressive communities in the country when it comes to incorporating affordability into private, market-rate development,” Fontana said.

City attorney Michael Pinto detailed a proposed amendment to the originally submitted policy Tuesday night that would make clear that projects that have already received some level of administrative approval from the city — whether from the Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) or the City Plan Commission or the Board of Alders — will be grandfathered in to the existing housing market rules, and will not have to follow the IZ affordability mandates. Like just about all laws, he said, this one is future-looking: it will affect projects going forward, not ones that are already in the pipeline.

Click here for a previous story detailing how the IZ proposal would work. And click here, here, here, here, here, here, and here to read the inclusionary zoning ordinance documents submitted to the Board of Alders.

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