A new housing bill reignited a longstanding battle between dense cities and small towns. When Connecticut needs more affordable housing, who is responsible for building it?
State Rep. Tony Scott rose to the stand, prepared to condemn a housing bill he’d had only one hour to read. It was November 12, 2025, and the Connecticut House of Representatives had gathered in an emergency session to debate HB 8002, which State Senator Ryan Fazio would later call “the most consequential piece of housing legislation [Connecticut] has passed in decades.”
Democrats made HB 8002 public only an hour before the special session was called. Governor Ned Lamont and Democratic leaders argued that Connecticut’s housing crisis was dire enough to justify the emergency meeting.
But critics weren’t convinced. After all, in June, Lamont had vetoed HB 5002, an omnibus housing affordability bill that had already passed the House and Senate. Now, representatives were back in the House, debating what some perceived as a near-replica of the original bill.
“How many housing units will this bill create in the next twelve months?” Scott—representing Monroe, Easton, and Trumbull—asked the speaker, Rep. Antonio Felipe.
The bill wouldn’t create more housing, Felipe said, but it would mandate that towns create plans to build housing.
“So we’re here in an emergency session,” Scott responded, “for something that is not guaranteed at all to [build] any more housing, let alone affordable housing.”
Under HB 8002, Connecticut municipalities must either create their own plans to develop more affordable housing or join regional ones. The state will withhold substantial funding from towns that don’t sign on.
The debate over HB 8002 rehashes a perennial conflict in Connecticut. Cities believe they’re burdened with resolving the statewide housing crisis. Towns argue that cities have the capacity and responsibility to do it.
Fourteen days after the House session, Lamont signed the bill into law.
1. THE AERIAL VIEW
From 2023 to 2024, New Haven’s registered homeless population doubled to 633. Half of the city’s renters are considered cost-burdened, spending over 30 percent of their income on housing. Solutions to New Haven’s housing shortages typically address burdened homeless shelters, the boom of luxury housing, outdated zoning laws, and Yale’s expansion. But some advocates argue that to understand the city’s affordable housing crisis, we have to look statewide.
Connecticut’s housing stock has only marginally increased since the early 2000s. Some estimates report that the state lacks between 120,000 and 380,000 units.
Advocates and public officials from denser cities such as New Haven and Hartford argue that urban areas are already afflicted by their own shortages. Meanwhile, affluent towns such as Greenwich and Darien have the space—and a wealthy, taxable population—to fund new mixed-use housing projects. For the bill’s advocates, HB 8002 is a step toward rebalancing the responsibilities of cities and towns.
But critics of the bill argue that towns lack the infrastructure to support rapid housing development. They worry that uncontrolled housing projects aimed at affordability would infringe on local control and suburban character, that high rises will sprout up next to their three-bedroom homes. Their mantra? Let cities be cities and towns be towns.
2. NEW HAVEN’S BURDENS
Susan arrived in New Haven about five years ago, eager to conduct biology research at Yale. But after two years of growing frustrated that her academic pursuits weren’t contributing to meaningful social change, she decided not to renew her contract. For the next two years, she moved from job to job, looking for something that would let her serve others. (Susan asked to be identified with a pseudonym, fearing repercussions from her current employer.)
During this time, Susan dealt with the city’s unforgiving shortage of jobs and housing. She couldn’t keep her small room in East Rock. For a few weeks, she couch-surfed. Then she left for a farm with free housing, then an apartment in Dwight, then one in Westville, and then to wherever was cheapest. At each place, she encountered a new difficulty: no heat, no windows, negligent landlords, basements flooded with sewage. All the while, rent went up.
Finally, Susan got the job offer she’d been waiting for. She now works as a housing coordinator, helping renters with mental health struggles find affordable housing. But even with the wage increase, her own housing security remained uncertain. “I came very close to not having any place to move, even though I had a job,” Susan said. She currently lives in a windowless studio in Middletown and commutes forty-five minutes to her office in West Haven.
Susan’s job offers her a ground-level view of New Haven’s turmoil. She’s watched waitlist numbers for affordable units and housing subsidies climb into the thousands. Landlords, Susan said, often try to make it difficult for the renters she works with. In some cases, they discriminate against those on social security or housing vouchers. There are also the renters caught in between, not earning enough by some landlords’ standards but earning too much to qualify for federal support. And last October, the Trump administration laid off half the staff at the Department of Housing and Urban Development—the agency that manages federal housing aid and monitors compliance with the Fair Housing Act.
“People are generally struggling to afford housing, but they want to be here so badly,” Susan said. “At the same time, people are really beaten down by the system that we have right now.”
While the city has tried to address homelessness, opening two new warming centers and maintaining eight shelters last year, its remedies do little to address the root cause. By all metrics, New Haven has been put in a difficult situation. In last year’s State of the City Address, Mayor Justin Elicker argued that New Haven, one of the few municipalities to welcome new developments, has to pick up the slack of other towns that won’t.
Legislators designed the original omnibus bill, HB 5002, to specify housing growth targets for every region. These targets were based on local and state housing needs, factoring in variables such as income, population, and property value. Wealthier regions with less affordable housing would’ve had higher goals to achieve.
HB 8002, the more recent bill, lacks these specifics. Instead, municipalities can set targets on their own or sign on to a regional plan. Proponents of the bill recognize that it is a watered-down version of HB 5002. But they knew something had to be done, and they believe the new bill accounts for both cities and towns.
“[HB 8002] ensures towns can achieve the housing growth necessary to support our state’s population on their own terms,” Rep. Bob Duff, the Senate Majority Leader and a Democrat representing Norwalk and part of Darien, wrote in an email to The New Journal. “It’s far from a monolith, and it’s our best opportunity to carve into the housing shortage impacting so many in Connecticut.”
3. ALL ZONED OUT
“Connecticut has a medieval political structure with 169 towns—all equal from a legal point of view and radically unequal from every other point of view,” said Alan Plattus, a professor at the Yale School of Architecture.
In 1924, the federal government granted states the ability to zone their own land. States then devolved this power to towns, letting them decide where a shopping mall could be built and how far they wanted the mansions from it.
Throughout the 1900s, suburbs established themselves as an alternative to cities, zoning their land to accommodate almost exclusively one- to two-acre single-family homes. From the suburban perspective, this split gave homebuyers the privilege of choice: to live in the hustle and bustle of a city or to retreat into peaceful town life. Cities were cities; towns were towns.
Critics of this model point to the segregationist undertones of suburban escape.
In a 2020 op-ed titled “Let’s Tax Connecticut’s Segregation,” Elicker wrote that affluent suburban towns perpetuated racial and economic segregation through exclusionary zoning. “The overwhelming majority of Connecticut towns,” he wrote, “use their zoning codes to actively prevent construction of [safe, quality, multifamily, and affordable] housing and, in turn, block Black families from moving in.”
In 2022, Yale Law School students and faculty filed a lawsuit against Woodbridge for this very tactic. They claimed the town had an “exclusionary zoning” ordinance that prevented the development of multifamily housing and supported segregation. For many proponents of HB 8002, it’s impossible to separate the classic definitions of cities and towns from the history of discrimination.
4. IN TRANSIT
Robert Bates has visited all but three states in search of work and secure housing. On the New Haven Green, I approach Bates as he concentrates on piling the perfect bite of rice and chicken onto a flimsy fork. His eyebrows furrow as he squints from the sunlight reflecting off the snow.
Bates grew up in Philadelphia. He served four years in the Air Force; played piano at restaurants; manufactured parts for airplanes; and worked as an accountant on “Black Wall Street,” a historic corridor of Black-owned businesses in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He wound up in New Haven in 2001. The city’s housing market wasn’t much better than elsewhere, but he had given up. He was here to stay. For his first two decades in New Haven, he was homeless.
“You have to live like a roach,” Bates said, motioning to the government buildings on the park’s perimeter. “You have to be somewhere where hopefully no one’s going to find you for the time you sleep. You’ve gotta wake up early in the morning before anybody sees you. And, basically, you walk like a nomad in a city [in] one of the wealthiest states in the country.”
In 2011, he got on the list for a Section 8 housing voucher. Ten years later, he secured a place. While better than sleeping in parks, Bates’s new downtown apartment came with its own complications. It lacked heat and a functioning stove. Rain trickled down from the ceiling and windows, destroying his beloved Yamaha synthesizer. Without a lawyer, he said, landlords wouldn’t listen to him.
When I asked Bates about HB 8002, he seemed skeptical, pausing for a moment to think about the brief time he’d spent in Connecticut suburbs.
“You can’t be seen there if you don’t have money,” he said, referring to Greenwich, Darien, and New Canaan. “[Residents there] call us transient. They know you don’t belong. You don’t dress like nothing. You don’t have a car. They’re going to whisk you out of there.”
While HB 8002 might promote new housing development in the suburbs, it doesn’t address the other reasons Bates can’t afford to live there. Especially during the coldest months, Bates said, walking everywhere to meet basic needs is untenable. It costs money to get around town.
5. BUILDING ON SHAKY FOUNDATIONS
Back in the House session, Senator Tony Hwang, representing Fairfield, took the mic. “The state holds the purse strings,” he said. Not complying with HB 8002 “means risking access to essential state resources—infrastructure funding, planning support, and housing investment. That is not a choice. That is pressure dressed up as flexibility.”
These state resources are crucial for suburban towns. They help fund infrastructure development, housing growth, school construction, and any plans that might require more money than a budget permits.
Some critics of the bill say that many towns will be forced to sign onto a regional housing growth plan—which they see as one-size-fits-all state interference. For instance, Greenwich would fall under the same category as Stamford, Norwalk, and Danbury. Under these regional plans, critics say that out-of-state developments might haphazardly spawn in areas that lack the roads, fire safety, and sewage systems to accommodate them.
Jon Zagrodsky is the first selectman of Darien, a quaint, affluent coastal town nestled between Stamford and Norwalk. Shingled Cape Cod homes lounge on the Sound’s sprawling beaches.
Building affordable housing would require updating the town’s infrastructure to accommodate increased car traffic. It could strain the sewage system and pollute green spaces, Zagrodsky said. He worries that Darien is not able to handle these demands because they’re already scrambling to keep up with new developments.
Instead, critics believe that states should subsidize affordable housing in places that already have the requisite structure, such as New Haven, North Hartford, or Granby. And besides, there are unique incentives to live in cities: job opportunities, access to nightlife and culture, and proximity to universities. It doesn’t make sense for supply to rapidly increase in places where people aren’t particularly inclined to live.
“You can’t just drop 300,000 people into the same congested corridors and then pretend traffic and school and sewers will somehow sort themselves out,” Zagrodsky said. “It’s ridiculous. I’m not saying places like Darien can’t do part of this. We will. But in my view, you need a balanced approach.”
6. THE CHARACTER OF SUBURBS
Since 2019, Fred Camillo has served as the first selectman of Greenwich, where he grew up in a blue-collar Italian neighborhood. He’s spent his life coaching baseball and volunteering. For the past eleven years, he has advocated for Greenwich in the state legislature.
To Camillo, HB 8002 is an opportunity for cities to assert unchecked control over places they’ve never taken the time to understand.
Greenwich is the 34th wealthiest suburb in America, with an average household income of nearly $300,000. But Camillo is bothered by the oversimplified characterization of the town as a refuge for the wealthy. He claims it ignores their socioeconomic diversity and housing progress. Over the course of six years, he noted, Greenwich has nurtured its housing authority and raised its affordable housing stock from 5.2 percent to 6 percent, with hundreds of new units already approved.
Greenwich’s numbers don’t do well when stacked up against cities such as New Haven and Hartford, where 33.4 percent and 40.8 percent of units are deemed affordable, respectively. But as critics of the bill note, suburbs and cities might just need different standards. Greenwich wasn’t designed to accommodate affordable housing, they say, and altering that reality, whether it be by city or state, takes time.
Greenwich makes no comparable attempt to govern the cities, the argument goes, so why should the inverse be allowed? “You have to let Greenwich be Greenwich. Right? You have to let Stamford be Stamford,” Camillo said. “And if Hartford wants to build a zillion units, then let them do it.”
Anika Singh Lemar is a clinical professor at Yale Law School and the head of several legal aid clinics. She sees the suburbs’ lack of infrastructure as the outcome of continued resistance to development. Since 2024, Greenwich has shut down three affordable housing projects over environmental concerns, blocking the development of more than two hundred units.
“It is incredibly disingenuous to say, We can’t do it,” Lemar said. “You don’t have the infrastructure [because] over the course of your town’s history, you’ve resisted or rejected the construction of that infrastructure at every opportunity.”
She also believes that the bill is misunderstood. It’s not as if colossal high-rises are going to replace neighborhood parks overnight, she said. HB 8002 only intends to promote multifamily housing, which could take the form of condos and twelve-unit developments.
The larger reluctance underlying resistance against HB 8002 is, once again, motivated by the dictum: Let cities be cities and towns be towns. At one point, suburbs set out to define themselves as a reactionary alternative to cities. Even as the world changes, towns have stuck true to that traditional mentality. “What they’re hoping to do is say that because a place looked a certain way at a random point in time, it has to look that way forever,” Lemar said.
Camillo said he’d be happy to personally take any critic around town, showing them the progress Greenwich has made and engaging in debate. But in every case, he’s been either turned down or ghosted.
Lemar said she’s received no personal invitation from Camillo, but if she did, she’d be happy to go. She doubts that she’d be convinced. “They’d have to eliminate minimum four-acre lots, eliminate discretionary review processes that have held up a gazillion projects, and they’d have to build four thousand units of affordable housing in order for me to take that tour and feel like, Oh, wow, Greenwich has really done a lot.”
And while suburbs remain comfortable with preserving what they’ve defined as their character—a sanctuary of serenity marked by quiet streets and large parks—New Haven is rapidly losing its own.
7. HEART OF THE CITY
Sylvia Cooper moved into the Dwight-Edgewood Avenue community with her mother and sister when she was 3 years old. She grew up walking down Day and Chapel Street, wandering the Yale University Art Gallery, playing on the New Haven Green, and checking out books from the Ives Main Library. For the fifty-nine years she’s lived here, there has always been a couch to sleep on and a cup of sugar to borrow.
But crippling rent forces her to make impossible choices all the time. “Do I buy food? Do I pay for transportation? Do I have a place for my children to stay?”
Cooper is one of the many New Haven renters who earn too little to keep up with market-rate housing prices and too much to qualify for units designated affordable. She feels that she spent years paying taxes to a state and city that didn’t offer any help in return. Then a five-year illness took her out of the workforce, leaving her with debt and a low credit score.
Something had to change. So Cooper pivoted, setting her sights on homeownership. Through Neighborhood Housing Services, she learned how to increase her credit score and use mortgage discounts. At no point did she consider leaving New Haven. Here, in these multi-cultural neighborhoods, she said, she has always felt like she belonged.
Cooper has attended the Housing Services’ courses for three years. It paid off. She has a house lined up in Newhallville. “I’m a stakeholder now. I have to pay taxes. I want to be invested in what’s going on in my community, what crime looks like, the lighting on the street, beautification projects,” Cooper said. “I’m not just buying a piece of property. I’m investing in my community.”
But New Haven apartments are changing, she said. New out-of-state developers threaten to overwhelm the city’s historic streets with large luxury apartments.
“I look at myself as one of the old mom and pop landlords,” said Robert Megna, a former state legislator and a landlord in New Haven since the nineties. “But the mom-and-pops have disappeared, and you’ve got these big syndicates taking their place.”
Since 2020, New Haven has approved the development of ten thousand housing units––some of which are mixed-income. Twenty-four percent of these units are projected to be affordable.
John Lockhart, the director of investments and operations for Catalina Buffalo Holdings—a new player in the New Haven real estate market—believes that it has become increasingly difficult to build affordable apartments outright.
Instead, to make a profit, developers must sell expensive units. Affordable housing is being built, but only when supplemented by luxury and market-rate units. A 200-unit apartment complex opened downtown at the end of 2024, offering forty affordable units; last July, Dixwell welcomed a 176-unit complex with fifty-eight; in January, New York-based developer LMXD unveiled a 283-unit complex in Science Park with fifty-seven.
In this way, the buildings are split. Some of the units are affordable, but most are not. The large glass apartments stand out in the heart of New Haven. And as Lemar said, new housing in the suburbs would look different, with condos and townhouses instead of skyscrapers.
“People should be able to live wherever they want to live,” Cooper said. “But at the same time, those of us who’ve been here through the struggle, the changes of the housing stock—like wow, is this New Haven? Is this us as a city and as a people?”
Cooper is not against affordable housing development. Far from it. But these necessary housing projects are reshaping her city. Gone are the familiar windows of local storefronts. Today, when Cooper walks through her old neighborhood streets, she often looks through the glass windows of new luxury apartments. Each time, she’s unsettled by the sight of recently transplanted residents running on recently transplanted treadmills.
Towns are worried that the bill will change their local character. Will HB 8002 also change the character of cities? It depends on how you define cities. Cities are expected to densify. Residents are supposed to enjoy the excitement of progress.
Yet, Cooper and other New Haveners might want to access the same unchanging “character” that suburbs cling to. They might want to continue appreciating the parks, walking space, and historical buildings.
“I just happened to be a person, a girl, young woman, and now an older woman who happened to like the city,” Cooper said. “Fell in love with New Haven, you know, that’s just where my heart is. I have the heart of the city.” ∎
Kade Gajdusek is a junior in Berkeley College and a copy editor for The New Journal.