I missed this letter to the editor from Margarita Alban, published earlier this week
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proposed (later withdrawn) apartment building at 143 Sound Beach Avenue, old greenwich,that would have included both moderate and Market-rate units. Ct’s new housing mandate will likely bring something similar back, soon
I’m including only those excerpts that address the hurdles facing towns by land and building costs, but read the entire letter. I’m also posting a portion of an article on Maine’s encountering the same problem in its own goal of increasing the supply of "affordable” housing: land and building costs mke such housing nearly impossible to build.
Whatever Maine’s problem with the cost of land, you can multiply that number by at least !0X in the affluent towns CT’s Democrats have targeted; If a multi-unit project in Greenwich or Westport or New Canaan must include a substantial percentage of low and moderate priced units, the price of the others must be substantially hiked to cover the sky-high price of land here. The result will be more housing for the very rich and the very poor and none for the middle class. Greenwich is already becoming a town comprised solely of just two classes and the new requirements will only accelerate that transformation. Of course, that’s the Democrats’ goal for all of America, but we maight s well try to delay and maybe even thwart that effort.
HB 5002 Fails US ALL
June 3, 2025
Submitted by Margarita Alban [Chair of the Greenwich Planning & Zoning Commission, but writing as a rivate citizen]
The housing bill just passed by the CT General Assembly, HB 5002, is a combination of 22 different bills proposed during the 2025 legislative session. The bill moved so quickly that Planning & Zoning is still unpacking its language and potential impact. My personal view is the bill does not tackle the single greatest obstacle to the creation of affordable and diverse housing in our State.
HB 5002 fails because it doesn’t address funding or economics. The bill presses municipalities to increase housing density. In the face of that, it’s worth knowing Greenwich Planning & Zoning has recently approved over 1,000 new housing units. Yet, many of those housing units aren’t being built.
Why aren’t we seeing that housing construction? Builders tell us they are struggling with increases in materials costs, interest rate hikes and tariff uncertainty. Other towns are hearing the same from their developers. That’s why approved housing projects aren’t moving ahead, not only here but throughout the State. Shifting economics.
….
Under the bill, Towns will be assigned new affordable housing targets based on a formula which relies on the value of the town’s real estate. The price of real estate is a very poor proxy for the size and location of populations needing reasonably priced housing.
From a planning perspective, I’m deeply troubled the bill is not rooted in a study of where our State truly needs more housing and at what income levels the housing gap is greatest. For example, I’ve seen no report of how far workers are commuting to reach their employment. Nor do we know how many people are at greatest need because they are unable to find housing. As a result, the bill fails workers with long commutes as well as our most vulnerable populations.
By focusing on zoning and superficial measures, HB 5002 fails to address the real issues and, thus, fails us all. ….
And:
The hole in Maine’s strategy to build more housing
Sam Hight only had to pay the town of Madison $1 for a prime parcel of land.
That allowed Hight and his partners to build an 18-unit affordable housing complex that opened last year. But it would not have happened without a state subsidy, even though the developers had essentially the lowest-cost construction plan for a project of this size.
“I’ve been trying to figure out a way to provide market rate housing using conventional financing, but with multi-unit buildings and interest rates and the cost of construction materials, it really didn’t pan out at all,” said Hight, who runs his family’s car dealerships in Skowhegan.
Hight’s experience is shared by others working on market-rate housing in low-income parts of Maine. It also shows a hole in the state’s strategy. Lofty housing goals rely on rural communities dramatically upping production. But developers cannot keep units affordable without subsidies [from Maine taxpayers, most of whom aren’t eligible for such housing — FWIW ED], meaning very little affordable housing will come naturally.
The Madison project cost $5 million, with $3 million in the form of a 45-year loan from a rural housing program run by MaineHousing. While the real cost was around $280,000 per unit, the subsidy dropped that to just over $110,000, enough to meet a requirement of keeping the apartments affordable to those making no more than 80 percent of the area median income.
Hight and his partners used modular homes from KBS Inc. of South Paris. They did not have to build roads or pay to hook up to utilities. The developers are set to begin construction on a similar 18-unit modular housing project in the western Maine town of Rumford this spring. The median household income there is nearly $40,000, according to Census data.
“We’re doing the cheapest kind of construction we can do,” Kara Wilbur, a developer with modular builder Dooryard who is partnering with Hight, said.
In Rumford, they bought the land for $12,000. That discount from its $46,000 valuation is one of a series of changes that the western Maine mill town Rumford has made recently to woo affordable housing developers.
Low-to-no-cost land is often a necessity to pencil out projects, said developer Kevin Bunker, principal at Portland-based Developers Collaborative, whose company has taken advantage of these sorts of deals in communities including Bangor, Portland and Augusta. It often helps projects score higher in MaineHousing applications for subsidies.
But it is no panacea. For one, George O’Keefe, Rumford’s town manager, said he is wary of giving land away because he wants to preserve property values. Construction costs and interest rates are also so high that it does not generally make much of a dent in price, Bunker said.
“If you think of land as maybe 10 percent of a total project and construction as maybe 80 percent, you can imagine even as land approaches $0 per unit, it doesn’t go as far as, say, a 20 percent reduction in construction,” Bunker said. ….