On the third of this month, our state legislature passed HB 5002, the omnibus housing bill known as “Work, Live, Ride.”  Supporters contend that the bill is a necessary step towards addressing our state’s dearth of “affordable” housing, while opponents decry the bill’s cracking down of local zoning restrictions.

However, both sides miss the mark here.  Opponents to the bill do not fully appreciate the insurmountable barrier that local governments often pose to new construction, while supporters gloss over the bill’s introduction of central planning.  Therefore, I give a more nuanced summary of the bill, which hopefully provides a fuller consideration of the matter.

First, the bill restrains some of the worst excesses of municipal zoning.  Parking minimums, for example, waste land, drive up rents, and greatly increase construction costs.  The bill limits these to the extent necessary to avoid “a specific adverse impact on public health and safety,” thus making future housing cheaper to build and thus more affordable.  Furthermore, it also allows smaller lots to be used for rental units.

Likewise, with the advent of remote work, zoning restrictions have forced landlords to maintain vacant office buildings at great personal expense.  By allowing as-of-right conversion of commercial lots to middle housing (duplexes, triplexes, and the like), the bill helps lower rents by putting more units on the market.

Finally, state law currently allows existing residents to block zoning changes by complaining to the zoning board.  The bill raises the minimum proportion of affected property owners required to mount a challenge to a zoning change from 20 percent to 50 and also allows a simple majority of the board to disregard the challenge, thus preventing a NIMBY minority from holding veto power over new housing.

Another beneficial part of the bill is granting “transit-oriented districts” additional state funding, provided that they allow as-of-right development of middle housing and affordable apartment complexes. In an increasingly urban state, tying increased funding to zoning liberalization and alleviating car traffic is a great way to both lower rents and improve the quality of life for our state’s numerous city-dwellers.

Altogether, “Work, Live, Ride” takes many excellent steps towards increasing housing supply: it removes the worst barriers to new construction; it allows owners of vacant commercial lots to remodel and eventually rent them out to residential tenants; it rewards cities for facilitating the construction of new apartment buildings and even makes it easier for the residents of these buildings to get around. That makes it all the more tragic that the salutary effect of the aforementioned provisions is greatly handicapped by the pervasive spirit of state intervention in the economy.

For the most part, central planning manifests itself in “Work, Live, Ride” by the restriction of many of its protections, such as municipal plans to ease zoning regulations, to affordable housing.  This gives municipalities leeway to ban virtually all market-rate developments, so long as they permit sub-market ones.  There are two problems here: first, affordable housing, although it comes with all the risks and costs of market-rate housing, has rents so low that these risks and costs are often not worth it for investors.  Therefore, very little affordable housing will actually be built.  Second, the market-rate will remain high enough that individuals who could afford it will choose to live elsewhere, thus depriving our already-impoverished cities of much-needed jobs and tax dollars.

For the same reason, the legislature should have done away with the requirement that 30 percent of new units in apartment complexes in transit-oriented districts be affordable.  Not only does it discourage new housing, but it even leads developers to build luxury units in order to recoup their losses, thus resulting in a commensurate increase in rents.

Finally, the bill assigns a “fair share” of affordable units which each municipality is required to accommodate based on how many the Hartford bureaucrats decide are “needed.”  Once again, limiting this provision to affordable housing comes with all of the harms mentioned above.  In addition, market forces (a fancy term for our collective wants and the means to supply them) will ultimately dictate what kind, where, and how much housing gets built.  The state can set whatever goals it wants, but developers are under no obligation to meet them.

The facts of the matter being laid out, I have the following recommendations: first, Gov. Ned Lamont should call a special session of the legislature, as has been suggested.  There, the legislators should extend the bill’s protections to all housing and replace the “fair share” quotas with a general requirement that municipalities provide a friendly environment for new housing.

Finally, instead of trying to manage the poor by requiring more affordable housing, legislators should focus on increasing economic opportunity for all our residents, so that they may be able to afford the market rate themselves.

Michael Chuchev lives in Waterford.