Affordable Housing Shouldn’t Mean Surrendering Local Control

Connecticut’s top-down approach to affordable housing is both bad law and bad policy. By overriding local zoning authority, the Democratic supermajority in Hartford—including Senator James Maroney—has created a system that punishes municipalities, disregards established zoning principles, restricts public participation, and favors private developers over residents. Connecticut can do better. With new leadership in state government, we can expand access to housing people can afford while preserving meaningful local control over zoning.

A better system begins with infrastructure. Multifamily housing cannot be built at the scale Connecticut needs without adequate public water and sewer capacity, yet access to those utilities remains extremely limited. If state leaders are serious about increasing the housing supply, they must first invest substantially in expanding water and sewer infrastructure and explore public-private partnerships to help finance that work.

Next we need to implement a system that rewards thoughtful municipal planning and encourages public participation. Each community has different housing and infrastructure needs, and residents deserve a meaningful opportunity to be heard on development applications. Targeted financial incentives can help municipalities update their zoning regulations to accommodate housing that meets local needs while advancing the state’s broader housing goals.

Finally, we need to reform existing law to provide a fairer system and better transparency. Under current law, plan and zoning commissions  - not private developers -  bear the burden of proving that their decisions to deny an application were supported by sufficient evidence and were necessary to protect a substantial public interest in health, safety, or another matter the commission may legally consider. The commission must also show that the public interest clearly outweighs the need for affordable housing and cannot be protected through reasonable changes to the project. In practice, that is an extraordinarily difficult burden to meet and leads to public outrage. It has allowed projects to advance even when they are plainly out of character with surrounding neighborhoods or raise significant public-safety concerns, as illustrated by the Woodbridge example.

Recent amendments to the law campaigned by Senator Maroney also allows a private developer to build a mixed-use development or middle housing on any commercially zoned lot, and prohibits local planning and zoning commissions from holding public hearings on those applications—even when the development does not include affordable housing units.

We must reform the law so that the burden is on private developers – not our towns – to demonstrate that their proposals will not harm neighborhood character or create unacceptable impacts on our communities. We also need to mandate public hearings on all developments outside of single-family homes so that residents have a formal opportunity to question, scrutinize, and help shape projects that may substantially affect their neighborhoods.

These changes will create a fairer and more transparent system that will actually result in meaningful development of housing that fits our local communities.