How many homes does Connecticut need to build over the next decade to address a dire lack of housing statewide?
An assessment now underway — one of the first steps in implementing the housing law passed during the special session late last year — will help determine that number.
An Office of Policy and Management working group, a temporary panel created to help implement the law, met for the first time Monday. The office must finish the study by December and OPM officials said they’ll use a fair share report, which assigned towns the number of units they’d need to build to address the regional housing gaps, in their final product.
The fair share report, produced by consultants last year, was controversial. Opposition to fair share was part of what ultimately led to Gov. Ned Lamont’s veto of a housing bill passed during the 2025 regular session. Phil Shattuck, an OPM planning analyst, said the agency plans to “layer other data on top of” the fair share study.
After statewide needs are determined, councils of government can work on their regional plans to build more housing. Towns can participate regionally or opt to make decisions without COGs’ input. The law says they must establish housing growth plans, which show how they’ll allow more housing, beginning in 2028.
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“We interpret those statewide needs to be very broad, including all income bands, and really about needs for affordability, accessibility and adequacy of housing,” said Rebecca Augur, head of the Office of Responsible Growth, which is part of OPM.
Housing Committee ranking member Rep. Tony Scott, R-Monroe, issued a statement Monday decrying the use of the fair share study, saying that the numbers are “astronomical.” The study lays out three different analysis of the housing need, with widely different numbers of units needed.
Monday’s meeting was the second this month related to implementation of the new law. The first was a meeting of the Council on Housing Development, which was established through the new law to review towns’ housing growth plans. That group had its inaugural meeting on Tuesday.
“This topic is obviously very complicated and has been very fraught, and the bill that created this council continues to be poorly understood by a lot of the folks in Connecticut, particularly at the municipal level,” said John Guszkowski, a planner and the co-chair of the council, during Tuesday’s meeting. “So it’s my hope and my pledge that we can work together to serve all the communities and all the people of the state in this role, and to help towns, cities, developers and advocates create more housing across the state.”
The council has a slew of tasks ahead of it, including advising on guidelines for towns, establishing reporting methods for progress on housing development and reviewing grant applications from towns that may need to expand infrastructure to build more housing.
The law that established the council, known as House Bill 8002, passed during the special session. Lamont called the session after he vetoed the housing bill Democrats in the General Assembly passed during last year’s regular session.
While the council will stay in place and is statutorily required, OPM’s working group will disband after the assessment is complete. The working group is made up of town and council of government representatives, planners, housing experts and state officials from a few agencies.
The statewide needs assessment is one of the early steps in implementing the law. OPM has until March 1 to issue guidelines for town and regional housing growth plans. By July 1, the agency has to create tools to allow municipalities to inventory their developable land.
Augur said they hope to have the housing needs determined by the fall.
Regional housing needs will consider the number of people paying too much in rent, housing quality, whether a home is overcrowded and the mismatch in supply compared to demand, Shattuck said.
A sewage needs assessment is also supposed to be done, but Augur said OPM will miss the July deadline. She said she thinks a robust study will take a couple of years. A lack of sewer capacity has been a barrier for many towns in building new housing, although some have historically declined to expand sewer capacity.
Betsy Gara, executive director of the Connecticut Council of Small Towns, said one of the issues for municipal leaders with the original fair share proposal was that it didn’t consider sewage and wastewater capacity.
“We’re hopeful that this new methodology will fairly consider water and wastewater capacity. I know that the [sewage needs] study is not going to be done,” Gara said. “However, municipalities themselves are acutely aware of their limitations on wastewater and water capacity.”
Ginny Monk is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (https://ctmirror.org/ ). Copyright 2026 © The Connecticut Mirror.