Erin Boggs
Executive Director, Connecticut Open Communities Alliance
Age: 51
Industry experience: 27 years
The Connecticut Open Communities Alliance is committed to breaking down barriers to housing access that contribute to economic inequity. Erin Boggs leads the Hartford-based organization, which filed a lawsuit in August alleging that the town of Woodbridge’s zoning violates the Connecticut Fair Housing Act and state Constitution. The organization has an option to purchase a parcel at 2 Orchard Road in Woodbridge for a four-unit mixed-income development. A former attorney at the ACLU of Connecticut, Boggs has spent 20 years as a housing advocate including six years as deputy director of the Connecticut Fair Housing Center before joining the alliance in 2013.
Q: Was there a catalyzing moment that led to the formation of the Alliance?
A: I am the founding executive director and we created the alliance to address a void in the housing advocacy landscape in Connecticut that is focused on civil rights issues, free from state government funding and positioned to leverage legal advocacy to address segregation in Connecticut.
Q: Has zoning reform always been a primary focus of the alliance’s strategy?
A: There’s been an evolution. When we first started, we recognized that zoning was an important issue. Our focus was to a greater extent on the location of government investments in subsidized housing: the barriers within the housing voucher program that prevented families from using them in communities that were resource-rich. Over the years, it’s become clear that restrictions on zoning are themselves a real challenge to creating housing that’s more affordable.
Q: What elements of a community’s zoning point to a potential legal challenge?
A: Whenever you have zoning and planning regulations that take large swaths of towns off the table for housing development, you’re going to have concerns about whether there is enough affordable housing. And we actually have a legal structure in Connecticut that ostensibly is very favorable to denser development and affordable housing. The zoning enabling act makes it clear that towns [should be] zoned to some level of affordability. There are state constitutional provisions that make it clear we can’t have policies that promote segregation, and of course we have state and federal fair housing laws that protect against disparate impacts upon certain groups. In this case, there is such an impact on Black and Latino families.
Q: What’s the basis of the lawsuit that the Alliance filed against the town of Woodbridge?
A: There is very little land that is available for denser housing development, and even though we requested that the town make changes and offered a very specific initial step they could take, the town has not made the changes to their planning and zoning that would allow them to come even closer to a fair portion of the regional need for affordable housing. We expect some form of a response from the town in the next few weeks.
Q: What’s your reaction to how Connecticut communities have responded to the June deadline to submit affordable housing plans, including more than 50 that have failed to do so?
A: In the law that creates the obligation, there is very little information about what is supposed to be in those plans. The requirement to have a plan is a very low bar. The other concern with those quote-unquote “plans” is there is no guidance from the state about any particular goals that towns are expected to reach. On the one hand, I don’t think the [affordable housing development law] 8-30g obligation gets us very far in terms of addressing the cost of housing in Connecticut. On the other hand, what I’ve seen in towns across Connecticut is getting through the process of creating the housing plan has been an initial first step that compelled people to come together and think about affordable housing creation in a way that they haven’t previously.
Q: The alliance has been a vocal supporter of the Fair Share Planning and Zoning bill. What would make that an effective tool to generate housing production?
A: The Fair Share bill is modeled after a highly successful court decision in Mount Laurel, New Jersey . You have enforcement provisions, and the process is on the road to create somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 units of affordable and market-rate housing. For the proposal, what we pushed for last year, and what will likely be the proposal this year, is a bill that sets up a structure for fair share planning and zoning. It creates an obligation for a state agency, probably the Office of Policy and Management, to assess the need for affordable housing and allocate a number to towns fairly based upon a number of factors that track back to what the towns have done already, the town’s wealth and capacity to host new families, and then be expected to plan and change their planning and zoning to reach the goals of the allocation and receive technical assistance from the state. In terms of enforcement, that piece is left open. All the bill requires is that OPM set a number of recommendations on enforcement. The town is not responsible for building anything, but the town is responsible for laying the groundwork for the building that needs to happen. But that means they can be very creative about it and what works for their community: inclusionary zoning, land trusts, missing middle housing or subsidized housing.
