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01/04/2021 11:00 PMEditor’s note: This is the second in a series of articles on the effect of zoning on race in Madison. Madison’s population is about 94 percent White, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, compared to around 75 percent in the state of Connecticut. Fewer than 100 Black people call Madison home. While the state has become more diverse in population over time, Madison’s numbers haven’t budged.
Modern zoning appeared in 1927, when Connecticut vested municipalities with the power to zone their communities through the Zoning Enabling Act, which roughly coincided with the birth of redlining, the federal practice of devaluing or refusing to insure homes loans in Black or integrated communities. Before 1917, zoning rules were often used to explicitly segregate neighborhoods around the country, disallowing the sale of homes to Black families in White areas, and vice versa.
As White families moved to the suburbs and built wealth, Black families were left in overcrowded, insufficient city dwellings, with no opportunity to build their own wealth, particularly through home purchases. Today, Black families on average have about 10 percent of the wealth of White families, according to data collected by the Federal Reserve. Gaps between White and Hispanic wealth are similarly massive, meaning that the purchase of market-price single-family homes—the kind of homes which make up the vast majority of living spaces in Madison—is simply not possible for a lot of non-White people.
In Connecticut, municipalities are allowed to broadly regulate zoning within their own borders. Though the state statutes that govern zoning practices are extensive and provide significant requirements and guidelines for different processes, it is the local boards and officials that have the largest role in shaping policies and drawing maps that influence what a town’s housing can look like.
The zoning process is a complicated, multi-faceted affair and must include a very broad array of concerns that range from protecting environmental assets to streamlining traffic and parking to encouraging healthy development. But for a long time in Madison, these processes have also excluded the type of housing that would help diversify the town.
When describing the barriers that prevent more diverse housing in a place like Madison, desegregation advocates describe two things: the often exclusionary regulations themselves and grass-roots community resistance.
Another barrier, which is mostly out of the control of local officials, is land cost, and many housing advocates admitted that there is no simple answer or solution to this. Land will almost always be cheaper in a place like New London or Hamden compared to Guilford or Madison, which for some developers can make all the difference in a project, though incentives at the state or local level or land gifted or donated can overcome this barrier as well.
But it is through those other two areas—regulation and resistance—that towns communicate that they are not open to the kind of inclusionary housing that would allow a more diverse population to live there.
After almost two decades of making almost no progress in adding more affordable housing, in the last year or so Madison has pushed ahead with at least three significant projects that would significantly add to affordable housing stock. Most recently, the Board of Selectmen (BOS) indicated that it would offer some form of tax incentive to a project brought by local non-profit HOPE Partnership that would add 31 affordable rental units in town.
Though this and other recent developments have received significant support, with HOPE Partnership President Dave Carswell calling the town “terrific” in its support, for many decades, affordable housing developments have been less well received, or have not even been proposed at all in town.
Again, part of this is due to prohibitively high land costs, according to both housing advocates and town officials, as well as other structural barriers like septic system limitations.
Matt Straub is a program officer at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), which is a national non-profit that helps affordable housing developers fund projects, as well as advocating and lobbying for inclusionary housing. He said that often, developers see or hear about a particular town being unfriendly to affordable housing and will simply not waste their time or money trying to push it through the approval process.
“The regulations themselves, or the processes themselves [don’] preclude the development of affordable housing,” Straub said. “It’s when that’s used to slow things down and drive up costs that that is when developers say, ‘Forget it, that’s not going to work,’ and they either walk away or never show up in the first place.”
According to Town Planner Dave Anderson, it was grass-roots opposition from the community that at least partially contributed to the town passing on affordable housing proposals for the shuttered Academy School property. That property, which is still vacant, was eventually designed as a $14 million community center, though a referendum on that project was delayed due to the pandemic.
Many see this as a positive and indeed, democratic process: If residents do not want a particular project or a particular type of housing, they can and should make that clear, and see their elected officials respond. Many concerns raised by Madison residents about adding some types of denser housing, from traffic issues to tax increases to historic preservation, are all part of what many see as ensuring the town remains the kind of community they love.
But advocates say many other expressed or implied fears, including a loss of “community character,” degradation of property values, or crime surrounding affordable housing are either nonsense or entirely exaggerated. And since excluding all types of affordable housing effectively excludes a disproportionate large swath of the Black and non-White community, housing advocates say residents of towns like Madison have a responsibility to be more thoughtful and learn more about what inclusive housing really looks like.
Finnoula Darby-Hudgens is the director of operations of Connecticut Fair Housing Center, which represents victims of housing discrimination and advocates for more inclusionary housing practices. She said that the kinds of ideas many people hold about affordable housing and those that live there are simply not based in reality, and often built on harmful racist and classist stereotypes.
“We take all of our stigmas and our implicit biases about low and moderate income families in Connecticut, and we then make housing that would support them ‘a burden,’” she said.
Most lower-income people living in these affordable housing complexes are full time workers and own cars, according to Darby-Hudgens. Worries about an increase in crime are almost entirely unfounded, with dozens of studies finding no link to these developments and any kind of crime, and the image of cinder-block highrises and run-down buildings is really never what these developments look like, Darby-Hudgens said.
Evidence for the effect on property values in affluent suburban towns has been decidedly mixed, with some studies show slight decreases in surrounding home values, others showing no effect, and others even linking affordable housing to a slight boost in the value of nearby homes. Most of these effects are extremely minor regardless, with one study showing a loss of valuable comparable to losing one half a square foot of a home.
Straub and LISC worked directly on the HOPE Partnership community. Though even that project received some pushback from neighbors, both residents and town officials have lauded the design, professionalism, and Madison-ness of the community, something Staub said is a result of collaboration, rather than contentiousness between developers and towns.
“We work directly with local groups and municipalities on identifying affordable housing needs in their community and supporting local groups of volunteers...who can support an affordable housing development,” Straub said.
Through education, exposure, and local support, Straub and others said they have seen an increased understanding and acceptance for what affordable housing can be. At the same time, though, Madison residents are worried about many other ways a shift in housing policy can affect their town, from a loss of the nebulous “community character” to the erosion of local control of zoning through state policies like the much-feared (and often misunderstood) 8-30g.
In the next article in this series, The Source will examine these issues, as well as delving into the more structural barriers written into the town’s zoning codes that limit affordable housing.