Connecticut has a housing affordability problem. On that much, everyone agrees. Where I part ways with Hartford is on the diagnosis — and the cure.
For more than thirty years, 8-30g has let developers override local zoning in towns where less than ten percent of housing is deemed “affordable.” Now “Fair Share” proposals would assign every town a housing quota dictated by a formula written in Hartford. Both rest on the same false premise: that our towns are the reason housing is expensive, and that a mandate can conjure homes out of thin air.
Mandates do not pour foundations. Builders do. And any builder in this state will tell you why nearly everything going up is high-end: Expensive housing is the only housing that pencils out.
Before a shovel touches the ground, a builder has spent months — often years — navigating permits, environmental reviews, and regulatory hurdles, with carrying costs accruing the whole time. Then come lumber, concrete, and fuel prices that keep climbing, plus labor costs inflated by union wage requirements. Stack those together, and the math is unforgiving. A builder who must spend premium dollars per unit must charge premium prices, or he doesn’t build at all.
Here is the truth 8-30g and Fair Share both ignore: A mandate does not lower the price of a yard of concrete. It doesn’t cut lumber costs, shorten a permitting timeline, or reduce a dump truck’s diesel bill. You can order a town to approve a thousand units, but if the cost of building each one hasn’t changed, neither has what those units must rent or sell for. That’s why decades of 8-30g have given us only litigation and resentment, not affordability.
There is a better way, and it starts with honesty about arithmetic. Housing prices fall when supply rises, and supply rises when builders can profit at every price point, not just at the top of the market. That means attacking input costs directly, in one serious piece of legislation, before anyone talks about mandating unit counts: streamline permitting so approvals take weeks, not years; sunset duplicative regulations that add cost without adding safety; reform wage mandates that price workforce housing out of existence; cut the taxes and burdens that inflate fuel, lumber, and concrete costs statewide.
The input costs are a system, and they must be tackled as one. Piecemeal politics is how we got here.
What Connecticut needs is smart planning from a holistic view: state government clearing the cost barriers it created, and towns — which know their roads, schools, and water and sewer capacity — planning the growth that fits. Local officials aren’t the villains here; they’re the partners any workable housing policy must have.
I’ve spent decades as a property developer and served on several public building committees. I’ve seen firsthand how permitting delays, regulatory overlap, and rising input costs decide whether a project gets built — and who can afford to live in it. Hartford doesn’t need more mandates written by people who’ve never broken ground on a project; it needs legislators who understand the arithmetic of a construction site well enough to fix it.
Our families — from young people buying a first home to seniors hoping to downsize in the town they love — deserve better than mandates that don’t build and formulas that don’t add up. Let’s lower the cost of building homes, and the price of homes will follow.
Joe Kelly is a candidate for the State Senate, and a property developer with several decades of experience in the industry.
