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Column: Please Read Our Town’s Affordable Housing Plan

By Kimberly Fiorello

This is a call to action for Greenwich residents: please read our town’s Affordable Housing Plan. You can find it by searching online for “Town of Greenwich Affordable Housing Plan June 2022”.

You may have heard of “8-30g,” which is the Affording Housing Land Use Appeals Act. In Greenwich, where less than ten percent of the housing stock is “affordable” as defined by state statute, developers can use 8-30g to ignore local zoning regulations governing height, lot coverage, setbacks, traffic congestion and more.

If developers get their way, century-old structures, some historically-meaningful, could be demolished to make way for over-sized luxury-cum-affordable housing projects like Benedict Place/Benedict Court with 110 apartment units plus 190 car spaces on two levels of underground parking, and Church Street/Sherwood Place with 192 apartment units plus 235 parking spaces, and Brookridge Drive with 86 apartment units plus 183 parking spaces.

These changes would be irrevocable. “8-30g” is becoming a four-character obscenity among many residents.

Well, the Affordable Housing Plan is mandated by state statute “8-30j.”

8-30g and 8-30j are related, in that, the idea is for 8-30j to help give developers “more clarity” on what to build in each of Connecticut’s towns.

Search online for “Planning for Affordability in Connecticut, Affordable Housing Plan and Process Guidebook, December 2020” to learn more about 8-30j. See page 6 of the guidebook, which answers the question, “How does the Affording Housing Plan relate to 8-30g?” You will also find that the guidebook bears the logo of both the Connecticut Department of Housing and the Regional Plan Association, RPA.

RPA might ring a bell. It is the financial backer of activist group DesegregateCT, which purports to be a grassroots effort but, in reality, are paid lobbyists whose 2022 legislative agenda included bills to rubberstamp whatever builders want to build near train stations, to disallow one-acre single-family zoning and to regionalize zoning commissions. Thankfully, none of these bill ideas passed this session.

The Greenwich Affordable Housing Plan is 55 pages long and broken up into four sections –An Introduction and Executive Summary, An Affordable Housing, Land Use and Zoning Overview, A Housing Needs Overview, and Plan Goals and Action Strategies. A big thank you to those who worked on creating this document.

The next step is for this document to receive a rigorous reading. Residents, please read every page carefully, highlight sections you like or don’t understand, and ask questions. Lots of questions. There are no dumb questions. What’s most important is that the document reflect the will of the people.

The Greenwich Representative Town Meeting, RTM, will be voting on the Affordable Housing Plan at its Monday, June 13th meeting. If you know your RTM representatives, reach out to them with your questions. Or you can email all 230 members via a link that can be found online by searching “Greenwich RTM, Contact all 230 members.”

One question I have is, does the plan do enough push back on 8-30g and its arbitrariness, and instead, point to the bigger picture of what impacts housing affordability? Municipalities can only do so much; state and federal government actions do more to change market conditions for housing and influence consumer demand.

All 169 towns are busy putting their Affordable Housing Plans together right now. 8-30j originally mandated the plans be done by July 24, 2022. Last year, the legislature voted to change the due date to June 1, 2022. Many towns are going to miss this deadline, as is Greenwich. But it is better to get it right, than to rush it.

Please read the plan. Contact the RTM before its June 13th vote. Let’s get engaged. Now is the time. Later is too late.

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