Kiley Gosselin
Executive Director, Partnership for Strong Communities
Age: 40
Industry experience: 15 years
Kiley Gosselin is passionate about promoting policies that support affordable housing, a central part of her role as executive director of the Partnership for Strong Communities. A former aide to U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Gosselin worked for the partnership during her law school days before practicing law in Holland & Knight’s tax syndication group, where she represented investors in low-income tax credits that support financing of affordable housing. Following a stint in Washington, D.C. at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the Suffield native moved back to Connecticut in 2016 to work for Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin as a development official before joining the Partnership in 2018. The Hartford-based organization has approximately 120 partner organizations supporting its research and policy advocacy to create more affordable housing and reduce homelessness in Connecticut, as COVID-19 job losses intensify eviction and foreclosure pressures.
Q: What are the Partnership’s grassroots efforts to support the Desegregate Connecticut movement and zoning reforms that promote multifamily and affordable housing?
A: We have three people and we’re a small group, and we’ve been mostly working with partner organizations. We partnered with Fairfield County’s Community Foundation and the Regional Plan Association to create a Fairfield County Center for Housing Opportunity. That is an attempt to get down to the local level and start really addressing the message challenging and zoning at the local level. As a suburb of New York, Fairfield County is the highest cost area in the state. They’ve been heading up that effort for about a year and did a bunch of listening sessions, working with a communications specialist on the messaging.
Q: How do you optimize public outreach during the COVID era?
A: Like many nonprofits and real estate organizations, we transitioned quickly into a virtual format. We had a webinar in June or July about exclusionary zoning. In November, we’ll be hosting the “Tipping Point” series and that’ll be the first time we’ve hosted a virtual conference. And we’ve found that attendance is the same if not greater than we can get in our own building.
Q: What’s been the effect on your organization from the closing of the Affordable Housing Alliance of Connecticut?
A: That’s part of the reason we decided to take on the “Tipping Point” conference this year. We worked closely together for many years and we’re sad to see them go away. Part of the challenge is on the funding side for any nonprofit. It’s always difficult to match up grants with your work, and funding for advocacy is harder to come by. There’s an interest by corporate partners in one-time gifts. Funding for advocacy in a sustainable way means knowing that it takes years to get legislation passed and coalition building. That doesn’t have an immediate impact. I feel for AHA. We’re trying to pick up the mantle and restructure our affordable housing campaign. We were planning this before the pandemic and it’s more important to bring people under a bigger umbrella now. We’re in a strategic planning effort to recalibrate our efforts for where we need to go for the next five years. We want to bring in more partners: people who haven’t been involved at all, more tenant voices and developers, and an increased focus on racial equity.
Q: Which is the bigger hurdle to affordable housing creation in Connecticut: the financing challenges or zoning roadblocks?
A: There’s two separate problems. There’s always more applications for funding than there is funding to go around. We’re short tens of thousands of units in the state and demand for funding from developers is greater than what’s available. On the location side, here’s where it gets tricky. We’ve built the vast majority of affordable housing in urban areas. The exclusionary zoning makes it very challenging to build affordable housing in many places. And so the cost in overcoming those challenges even through 8-30g [Connecticut’s affordable housing zoning statute] is so time-consuming, developers a lot of times will move away from that. In cities, they’re more welcoming in that’s where a lot of housing is going. It’s important to tear down barriers and give folks a choice where they want to live.
Gosselin’s Top 5 Favorite Places to Visit in Hartford
- Elizabeth Park – Oldest Municipal Rose Garden in the U.S. and Amazing Gardens
- Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts
- Dillon Stadium – Home to the Hartford Athletic USL Soccer Team (and see surrounding Coltsville National Historic Park)
- Wadsworth Atheneum – Oldest Continually Operating Art Museum in the US
- Mark Twain House & Museum
