Affordable housing — Making room for everyone

New Haven, like many other urban cities, is caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to affordable housing. There simply isn’t enough stock to meet the demand and market-rate housing, whether new construction or old stock, has too many people priced out.

Two city officials — Serena Neal-Sanjurjo, who heads New Haven’s Livable City Initiative and Karen Dubois-Walton, who leads Elm City CommunitiesHousing Authority of New Haven — wonder if a civil rights, housing inequality legal challenge would force more suburban towns to develop more lowincome housing.

Any proposal to bring affordable housing to suburban towns is generally met with fierce resistance and as a result, it is being left up to urban cities to meet the demand.

The two housing specialists recently told the aldermanic Affordable Housing Task Force that options are running out and solutions are needed — and they’re needed nationwide for a crisis that is being called a “ticking bomb” as rents rise and inequality surges.

A Harvard University study found nearly a third of U.S. households paid more than 30 percent of their incomes for housing in 2016. Of that number, more than 20 million were renters — and 80 percent of renters and 63 percent of owners earning less than $30,000 were overwhelmed.

New Haven has approximately 17,000 units of affordable housing but that is still tens of thousand units short of what is needed. There are at least 10,000 families on a waiting list to get in to public housing and officials say more than 25,000 units are needed just to meet current demand.

But that demand won’t be met in the Elm City, as DuboisWalton says it is unrealistic to expect New Haven to absorb that burden alone.

Renters in greater New Haven are clearly challenged.

Consider this example: A developer recently proposed building 400 apartment rentals in the downtown area of Derby, the state’s smallest city with a population of just over 12,000, according to its website. The rents proposed — which are typical of developments being constructed — would start at $1,200 for a studio; climb between $1,450-$2,085 for a one bedroom and top off between $1,900-$2,700 for two bedrooms. The development is being built for incomes of $55,000 to $100,000.

That means a two-bedroom apartment could cost $32,400 a year to rent. The median income in New Haven, where 41 percent of families are spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, is $37,000 — and 63 percent of city residents are renters.

Some solutions the two housing specialists suggested to the Affordable Housing Task Force were: legislation requiring employers to pay “a housing wage” instead of a “livable wage,” and allowing urban public housing authorities to develop outside their municipalities. Proposed legislation on those suggested items went nowhere at the state legislature in 2017, but will be brought up again in 2019, according to Erin Kemple, executive director of Connecticut Fair Housing.

We certainly hope solutions will be proposed and adopted after an appropriate legislative process. People can’t say “there’s no place like home” if there isn’t one.

Connecticut has 169 towns and cities. It is unfathomable there isn’t enough room for everyone.

Any proposal to bring affordable housing to suburban towns is generally met with fierce resistance and as a result, it is being left up to urban cities to meet the

demand.