A century after Woodrow Wilson declared that government must be “an instrument of civilization,” Connecticut’s governing class appears to have adopted a post-Wilsonian corollary: that government must not merely serve but redesign society according to abstract notions of equity. Thus, the state now proposes the “Fair Share” housing mandate, a policy endeavor that treats towns as interchangeable blocks in a centrally planned grid—each to be assigned its “fair share” of affordable housing units by distant analysts armed with spreadsheets and unconstrained by modesty.
The premise is as bold as it is brittle: that housing affordability in Connecticut—a problem born of inflation, taxation, and regulatory overreach—can be solved by mandating thousands of new units in towns whose existing infrastructure, environmental constraints, and character are deemed irrelevant. Three scenarios have been advanced by the consultants tasked with this cartographic feat. Each reflects a kind of legislative megalomania in which top-down imposition is preferred to local deliberation.
The first simply resurrects a previously rejected model, favored by a developer-aligned nonprofit, which inflates “housing need” by factoring in everything from rising utility costs to local tax burdens—as though zoning boards, not state energy policy and unfunded mandates, are the source of residents’ economic woes. The second, even more ambitious, abolishes caps on how much housing a town might be ordered to accommodate, thereby sentencing small municipalities to demographic transformations they neither invited nor can feasibly absorb. The third leans on metrics such as job proximity and regional affordability, data points scrubbed clean of human context and offered as scientific justification for what amounts to civic colonization.
In all three cases, local governance is reduced to a procedural obstacle, its preferences and practicalities overridden by those who mistake bureaucratic abstraction for wisdom. This is not policy; it is central planning under the guise of social justice.
Consider New Canaan—a town that, far from resisting change, recently earned a four-year moratorium under the state’s 8-30g statute by developing legitimate affordable housing. Here is a municipality that acted, that planned, that built—only to discover that achievement is no defense against further demands from a state that equates fairness with compulsion and progress with density.
The logic behind these mandates is both economically unsound and philosophically hollow. That a household is “cost burdened” does not, by itself, indicate a failure of housing supply. The costs in question—energy bills inflated by state surcharges, property taxes driven by mandates—are themselves functions of state action. That the state now invokes the consequences of its own policies as justification for seizing zoning authority from local governments is a maneuver so brazen it would make Machiavelli blink.
Moreover, the faith that an increase in housing stock will, in the long run, produce affordability is belied by recent history. Stamford, despite aggressive multifamily development, has not seen rents decline in any meaningful way—its proximity to New York ensuring that demand outpaces even the most ambitious supply-side fantasies. And in the short term, these mandates will do precisely nothing to help cost-burdened families. The construction timelines alone make that clear. More immediate relief would come from expanding rental subsidies, reducing energy costs, and creating conditions conducive to wage growth.
But that would require humility—an acknowledgment that towns are not the problem and that bureaucratic fiat is not the solution. Instead, Hartford advances policies that are perfectly calibrated to ignite litigation, drain local coffers, and dismantle what remains of home rule.
The principle at stake is older than zoning ordinances and more enduring than housing trends: local self-government. Connecticut’s towns are not administrative subdivisions to be managed from a distance. They are expressions of civic judgment, repositories of social capital, and, at their best, exemplars of how a free people orders its life together.
That principle is now imperiled by policies whose only consistency lies in their disregard for nuance and place. The “Fair Share” mandate is not merely ill-conceived. It is philosophically offensive, economically implausible, and democratically corrosive. It should be rejected not with apology but with conviction.
For in the end, the state cannot simultaneously claim to be the guardian of equity and the enemy of local prudence. To mandate fairness by destroying local autonomy is to sacrifice the democratic process on the altar of ideological symmetry.
Let towns govern. Let planners plan. And let Connecticut remain a state of communities—not an administrative abstraction with asphalt ambitions.
