From Greenwich to Granby, Connecticut is searching for ways to construct additional housing to address a critical shortage estimated between 100,000 to 300,000 units. The number of people looking for housing is up, while housing permits, data shows, are not.
“Connecticut’s housing shortage is among the most severe in the country,” Gov. Ned Lamont said in a statement. “It is driving up costs for working families, deterring businesses from investing or growing, and worsening homelessness. Simply put, the status quo is unsustainable.”
Lamont recently negotiated a compromise housing deal that was approved last week by the Democratic-controlled legislature, but he says that much more needs to be done — a tenet of his reelection campaign.
“As I’ve said many times before, we will not be able to reach these housing targets without the support and collaboration of municipalities that can help execute these plans, including through investments in infrastructure,” he said.
“Over these last several months, I’ve consulted with state lawmakers, municipal leaders, housing advocates, and nonprofit partners to craft policies that will have a real-world impact and implement the tools we need to succeed in building more housing. This comprehensive proposal takes strong steps toward addressing this crisis and will help Connecticut reach these goals,” he said.
Through the 1990s and up to 2007, Connecticut saw in the neighborhood of 10,000 housing permits per year before a sharp drop off. By 2010, the number hovered around 3,000 and slowly increased. In 2024, CT Department of Economic and Community Development data shows, there were 6,840 permits for housing.
While the state’s housing shortage reaches all ages and incomes from low-income workers and recent college graduates looking for an apartment to elderly widows looking to sell longtime homes as local property taxes increase, Lamont says part of the issue is that more people are now living alone.
“When we were growing up, 10% of people lived alone,” Lamont, 71, told The Courant in an interview in Hartford. “Now, it’s about 30%. People marry a lot later, and they live a lot longer.”
In recent decades, the demographics have shifted sharply as elderly residents are living longer than in the past.
U.S. Census data that was released in 2023 showed that nearly 28% of American households had only one person, which represented a jump of nearly four times from 1940 at 7.7%. The trend has continued to increase in each decade for the past 80 years.
With those shifts, more apartments and homes are needed in Connecticut even if the overall population is not skyrocketing.
“Remember, 10 years ago, you couldn’t give away a house,” Lamont said.
“Now, everybody really wants to be here, and you can’t find a place to live. If you’re a single person, there’s no place to move. Every business I talk to says, ‘Will there be a place for young people to be before I move my business here?’ … I’ve got to double down on the amount of housing we’re doing,” he said. “That’s affordable housing, supportive housing, housing for single people.”
With that backdrop, Lamont and the legislature called for allowing commercial properties to be converted into residential structures “as of right,” meaning that they could be approved without public hearings by the local planning and zoning commissions. Republicans blasted the idea as a major loss of local control, but Democrats countered that developers would still need to comply with setbacks from property lines and other traditional rules of zoning.
After an extended debate, the state Senate voted 24-10 on party lines at about 1 a.m. Friday after the state House of Representatives had previously approved the measure by 90-56 with eight Democrats joining all Republicans in opposing the bill.
Senate majority leader Bob Duff of Norwalk, one of the chief negotiators on the bill, said that housing is a national issue with no easy solutions.
“We have to hit it head on,” Duff told reporters at the state Capitol. “People need housing. End of sentence.”
Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, a New Haven Democrat, said that passing the 104-page bill was “a major achievement in promoting affordable housing.”
But Republicans sounded alarm bells, saying the legislation would take away local control.
“This is monumental,” said Senate Republican leader Stephen Harding of Brookfield. “This is statewide zoning. … It’s quite scary, frankly.”
Sen. Ryan Fazio, a Greenwich Republican who is running for governor, said the housing bill is “the most significant affront to local control that our state has seen in a generation.”
Democrats countered that the Republican concerns were overblown. For commercial properties to be changed to residential, the developers still must submit plans to the town that must be signed off by the local planning, engineering and zoning departments, said House majority leader Jason Rojas, a Democrat who crafted much of the bill with Duff.
Rojas rejected the view by some Republicans concerned about a potentially large loss of commercial property, saying that he doubts that developers would tear down profit-making commercial properties in order to convert them to residential.
“That doesn’t seem logical to me,” Rojas said, adding, “Most developers are not building gigantic subdivisions anymore.”
The statistics, he said, show that many workers are stretching their dollars in order to afford the monthly rent. In a high-cost state, Rojas said that 25% of renters are spending more than 50% of their income in order to live in their home – far beyond the traditional recommended maximum of 30% of gross monthly income for housing costs.
“The bill doesn’t take away local control. It actually supports local control,” Rojas said on the House floor. “This bill is actually going to help small towns.”
National view
Connecticut, Lamont said, is different from some other areas around the country regarding both housing and politics.
“You go around the rest of the country, and you’ve got Republicans saying, ‘If you believe in economic growth and opportunity, we’ve got to speed up the regulatory process,’ and that’s what they’re doing,” Lamont told The Courant. “In Connecticut, the roles are reversed. At least a lot of suburban Republicans are saying we don’t want it and slow it down.”
Two of the most influential lobbying groups at the state Capitol, the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities and the Council of Small Towns, had both urged Lamont to veto the first version of the housing bill, which he did in June. The groups then joined with Lamont to support the renegotiated bill that passed last week. The changes included removal of the highly controversial “fair share” language that had generated controversy in Fairfield County in recent years as towns said they should not be forced to reach certain levels of affordable housing.
Another change was made on the controversial issue of parking. The first bill said that developers could construct as many as 24 apartments without mandatory minimum parking requirements. The final version dropped the total to 16 apartments, meaning that developments above that level would need to comply with the local regulations on parking.
The leaders of CCM and COST appeared with Lamont and Rojas during a news conference in East Hartford to hail the new version of the bill.
“We’ve got mayors behind us,” Lamont said. “They want to build the housing. We’re going to get it done. Stop playing politics.”
Unlike Republicans, Lamont said he does not have major fears that too much commercial property will be converted into residential.
“That’s happening anyway,” Lamont said. “Look at Hartford. Those commercial buildings are half empty. The idea that we would not want them to convert to housing where people have a lot of demand for housing is nuts to me. … It’s the most absurd argument I have ever heard.”
Hotels to apartments
In a major trend, hotels in Hartford have been converted to apartments. That includes the former Hilton Hartford hotel on Trumbull Street near the former XL Center in the core of the city’s downtown. Instead of a full-scale, 393-room, 22-story hotel, the structure is now partly a Doubletree hotel by Hilton, along with 147 apartments on the upper floors. In addition, the Red Lion and the Homewood Suites in Hartford were both converted to apartments.
At the same time, some suburban shopping centers are now struggling and converting to other uses. At the Simsbury Commons near the three-town border of Simsbury, Avon, and Canton in the Farmington Valley, a one-time Borders book store has been transformed into indoor pickleball courts. Nearby in the same commercial complex, a former Bob’s retail store was converted to an indoor spot where enthusiasts could drive go-carts. That outlet has since closed. A pending plan calls for a Chili’s restaurant and retail stores to be knocked down in order to provide space for as many as 300 apartments.
“These underutilized malls, underutilized old mills that have been sitting empty, old parking lots — these are the things we’re turning into housing,” Lamont said.
But House Republican leader Vincent Candelora said that his hometown of North Branford has only 14% of its property on the commercial tax rolls. If too much commercial property is switched to residential, that could hurt the tax base of his community and similar towns, he said.
“How about if a grocery store gets targeted?,” Candelora asked, saying that small towns cannot afford to lose important commercial properties.
Candelora predicted that out-of-state developers will swoop into Connecticut in order to try to make a profit.
“This is going to be a private equities dream,” Candelora said. “This bill is only going to put it on steroids and increase that. … A lot of private equity is going to move into the state of Connecticut.”
Lamont, though, said he has no fears that the switch from commercial to residential will be overdone on an economic basis.
“I think the politics will be overdone,” Lamont said.
Christopher Keating can be reached at [email protected]