As I was putting together the slides for the upcoming Legislative Update luncheons we do every year following the close of the legislative session, I was reminded by my good friend and colleague Meg Ryan at the League of the requirement in the big housing bill passed this year for the Utah Department of Workforce Services to “develop and submit to the Commission on Housing Affordability a methodology for determining whether a municipality or county is taking sufficient measures to protect and promote moderate income housing in accordance with” the required Moderate Income Housing element in its general plan. The Department is to submit the proposed methodology by December 1, 2022, and the Commission is to approve the methodology to be used by December 31.
Meg went so far in her proposed language for the slide for the legislative update luncheon to say this would encompass a regional share strategy for MIH. She relented and noted that the language in the housing bill doesn’t exactly say that (right, it doesn’t, see the quote above), but… . Meg’s insinuation is not out of line. CHA co-chair Rep. Steve Waldrip (and sponsor of the housing bill, HB462) has in public meetings opined on the possibility of looking at putting in place some kind of regional “fair share” requirement for communities around the state. Such a move would not be without precedent.
The best know state-level requirement for housing regional fair share is probably what is know as The Mount Laurel Doctrine in New Jersey. In 1975 and again in 1983, the New Jersey Supreme Court declared, in a ruling on a suit on this issue, that municipal land use regulations that prevent affordable housing opportunities for low income persons are unconstitutional and ordered all New Jersey municipalities to plan, zone for, and take actions to provide realistic opportunities for their “fair share” of the region’s need for affordable housing. This was a judicially-imposed requirement as the result of a legal challenge to local land use regulations, but it left a number of questions that needed answering, such as what is a region, what is the level of affordability, what is the expected growth and what constitutes a “fair share?” In response, in 1985, the New Jersey State Legislature enacted the Fair Housing Act which created an entity to assess the statewide need for affordable housing, allocate that need on a municipal fair share basis, and review and approve municipal plans for implementing their fair share of the obligation. You can read more of the details of the history and subsequent actions in New Jersey at the Fair Share Housing Center website. Wikipedia has a good summary of New Jersey’s actions as well.
Since then, a number of other states have enacted or considered enacting similar measures. And now with the recent explosion in the crisis of housing affordability in general around the country, more states are looking to it as well. One of the most recent has been Connecticut, which has been quite active in the “zoning reform” effort going on in many states. The Connecticut measures have a broad coalition of support, including the APA Connecticut Chapter and the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities (equivalent to our League of Cities and Towns).
In addition to the standard zoning reform measure of eliminating exclusive single-family residential zoning, the Connecticut legislature is now considering a “Fair Share Housing” bill. Under the measure, a town’s share would be based on its wealth, median income compared to other towns in the region, percentage of housing stock that’s multifamily housing, and the poverty rate. Towns would have to come up with plans by Jan. 1, 2025 and develop a new plan every 10 years after that. No locality would be expected to increase its housing stock by more than 20%, the bill states.
As may be expected, some local leaders are opposed to the bill, and for some good reasons.
“… opponents have cited a lack of local control as one of the reasons they don’t support the bill. Michael Criss, first selectman for Harwinton, said lack of existing water and sewage infrastructure had made it difficult to build more housing in his town. He added that rather than see a new bill passed, he wanted to observe the effects of 8-30j, which passed in 2017. The law requires towns to approve affordable housing plans every five years. The first plan is due in July. “There’s existing efforts and proven successful strategies out there,” Criss said. “We’re all trying to do our part to make it affordable to live within the state.”
This good story in the Hartford Courant outlines the back-and-forth now on-going in the Connecticut legislature on the proposed bill.
It will be interesting to see where this goes in Connecticut and in other places, maybe even right here in our own good old, rapidly growing and increasingly unaffordable state!