The New Haven skyline. (Courtesy Photo / Public Domain / Charles Barneby)
The umbrella group for New Haven’s public housing agency and affiliated nonprofits says the city needs to enact sweeping changes to land use regulations if it wants to get a handle on housing costs.
In a sweeping report that it said was built on extensive community consultations, Elm City Communities issued a challenge to city officials to permit 8,400 new housing units by 2030 to help address the city’s rising rents. New Haven needs more than 3,000 homes immediately just to return to 2019 vacancy rates, the report argued.
To do so, the Elm City Communities report recommended eight policy changes:
- Eliminate parking requirements to make projects more financially viable across a wider range of sites
- Shrink the city’s minimum lot size to 1,400 square feet citywide
- Eliminate unit density restrictions.
- Legalize single-room occupancy units to help house singles.
- End owner-occupancy requirements for accessory dwelling units, which the report said has hobbled ADU development
- Upzone exclusionary zoning in some neighborhoods, from low- to middle-density.
- Develop a set of pre-approved development designs that homebuilders can use to sidestep most permitting processes, similar to South Bend, Indiana.
- Switch to a land value tax to encourage property owners to develop their parcels.
The report notes that more than 85 percent of New Haven households making less than $20,000 a year pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing, along with 39 percent of households making between $50,000 and $75,000 and 8 percent of households making more than $75,000, with cost burdens concentrated in the city’s poorest neighborhoods like Newhallville and Fair Haven. Over half the city’s residents are cost-burdened, the report says, with tens of thousands on the wait-list for a public housing unit or a housing voucher.
In a press conference last week, Elm City Communities officials said the city can’t wait to act any longer after the most aggressive push in the General Assembly in decades failed to make progress on reining in suburbs’ exclusionary zoning this spring.
“Our state legislature and our governor failed to pass meaningful reforms” on housing this year, ECC policy director Will Viederman said, according to the New Haven Independent. “We can’t count on the state. It’s not enough [for New Haven] to say, ‘It’s not our fault and our neighbors should act.’ ”
