Central planners are going to tell you how to live and where to live whether you are in a city, suburb or rural community. The intention of legislators and bureaucrats is to mandate towns to fund development themselves, or have court intervention to force dense “as of right” market value multifamily development everywhere and end single family zoning in CT forever. These bills were never about creating true affordability. In addition, only 50% of housing vouchers are currently utilized in CT. Majority legislators refuse to pass meaningful housing voucher reforms to centralize waitlists, to centralize voucher allocations, to increase portability of vouchers and end the big city housing authority monopolies on housing vouchers.

The Proposed Bad Zoning bills will:

• Turn every suburban downtown into a small city, regardless of inadequate infrastructure, environment, historical areas, access to affordable mass public transportation and availability of jobs.

• Make no consideration of what exponential overdevelopment of housing stock with high rise apartments in downtowns would do, potentially creating greater congestion, stormwater runoff and pollution.

Connecticut has the second highest property taxes in the nation and the third highest utility costs (the highest electricity costs). CT’s residents scrimp, save and make great sacrifices when choosing to live in a specific neighborhood, and for most people, their homes represent their largest asset. Proposals that create over-densification with “as of right” 80-90% market value multifamily (mostly rentals) development are nothing but a gift to predatory developers and actually will diminish affordability and greatly impact local economic stability. These policies will cause more outmigration if CT’s underlying economic concerns and overall affordability is not addressed.

Multiple hive-minded housing advocacy groups like DesegregateCT, backed by developer funded Regional Planning Associates (RPA) have sprung onto the lobbying scene in Hartford with one orchestrated script, creating the illusion of many different voices but in reality are all inter-connected.

Bureaucrats’ “carrots” require municipalities to implement zones with “as-of” right multifamily development that can neve be reversed.

• Limiting entirely or severely restricting off-street parking requirements would cause inadequate parking for both residents and small local businesses.

• Coastal flooding and climate change resiliency and sustainability planning are largely ignored, as the bills would pack dense populations especially into coastal downtown areas that are most exposed to flooding. One size, top-down state mandates do not recognize the unique aspects of each of the 169 municipalities in CT. Responsible zoning decisions are best made by locally-elected officials, who are held accountable for establishing regulations that are faithful to the town’s Plan of Conservation and Development and who transparently apply those regulations without any favor or bias. Zoning is truly color blind.

• Legislative policies have had the unintended consequence of concentrating poverty. Case and point: housing voucher allocations are inequitably given to only certain large cities, neglecting areas with higher cost of rental like lower Fairfield County.