CT Housing Reform Lags Behind Neighboring States

Connecticut has passed just 11 land use reform bills since 2017. Rhode Island has passed 42. New Hampshire has passed 20. That gap, documented by New York University’s Furman Center and reported by the CT Mirror, tells you something about why Connecticut’s housing costs keep climbing while supply stays frozen.

The Furman Center tracks how hospitable each state’s legislative record is to housing construction, counting bills passed since 2017 across categories like accessory dwelling unit authorization, environmental review changes, and mandates that municipalities produce affordable housing plans. Connecticut’s count of 11 lands it in the middle of the pack nationally. For a state with a serious affordability problem and a housing stock that can’t keep up with demand, middling isn’t good enough.

State Rep. Jason Rojas, a Democrat who represents East Hartford and Manchester, doesn’t sugarcoat the structural reason Connecticut lags. Towns run land use in this state, and the legislature has let them do it largely unchallenged for decades.

“We have this deep romanticization with local control, even though we’re not a home rule state,” Rojas said.

That’s not a technicality. It’s the crux of the problem. Connecticut isn’t legally a home rule state, which means the General Assembly has full authority to set land use rules statewide and override local zoning if it chooses. What stops it isn’t legal constraint. It’s politics. Legislators have repeatedly chosen to defer to towns rather than hand down requirements from Hartford, even as housing costs have made the state increasingly unaffordable for working families.

Connecticut’s go-to move has been the carrot: financial incentives for towns willing to permit more affordable housing. Rojas says that approach has run out of road.

“There’s a lot more interest in providing incentives for communities to do things,” he said. “We’ve been doing that for a very long time, and given the outcomes that we have around housing production and housing costs in Connecticut, I can’t say that the incentive approach is actually working.”

The incentive strategy’s failure shows up unevenly across the state. Fairfield County illustrates how badly local control can distort a regional housing market. In Greenwich, single-family zoning has kept density so low that the median single-family home sale price climbed above $2.5 million. That’s not a market producing workforce housing. It’s a market producing exclusion, protected by zoning codes that towns have no particular reason to loosen when state law doesn’t require it.

Bridgeport faces different pressures entirely. There it’s not just restrictive zoning but a shortage of the private investment and infrastructure that makes housing production viable at scale. A state framework that treats Greenwich and Bridgeport identically, or simply leaves both to their own decisions, won’t fix either city’s problem. The 2026 legislative session hasn’t produced a bill that reckons seriously with that divide.

Rhode Island and New Hampshire didn’t pass 42 and 20 housing reform bills, respectively, by waiting for towns to volunteer change. They passed legislation that imposed new rules and moved authority upward. Connecticut’s General Assembly has the same power. It hasn’t used it at anything close to the same rate.

Rojas knows what it would take.

“I am more of a proponent of being more prescriptive about what towns and cities should be doing, but the politics are not necessarily on my side on that,” he said.

That’s an honest accounting of where Connecticut stands in 2026. The votes don’t exist yet for the kind of direct state intervention that would actually reorder local zoning at scale. Rojas can count them, and apparently so far they don’t add up.

What’s left is a legislature that agrees housing is a crisis, disagrees on what to do about it, and has produced 11 bills since 2017 to show for the debate. Rhode Island managed 42.