CT Housing Reform Lags Behind Neighboring States

Connecticut has passed just 11 land use reform bills since 2017, a pace that puts it well behind Rhode Island’s 42 and New Hampshire’s 20, according to a new tracking tool built by New York University’s Furman Center.

The tracker measures how easy or difficult it is to construct housing in each state by cataloguing legislation passed since 2017 that would help advance housing construction. Connecticut lands in the middle of the pack nationally. For a state with a persistent affordability crisis and a tight housing supply, that ranking isn’t a neutral outcome.

State Rep. Jason Rojas, a Democrat representing East Hartford and Manchester, said Connecticut’s structural reliance on local zoning authority is the core problem. Towns control what gets built where, and the state hasn’t done enough to change that balance.

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

That distinction matters. Connecticut is not legally a home rule state, meaning the General Assembly holds the authority to set land use policy statewide. But as a political matter, legislators have consistently deferred to towns rather than impose requirements from Hartford.

The tracker from NYU’s Furman Center counts legislation across several categories: bills authorizing accessory dwelling units statewide, changes to environmental review processes, and requirements that each municipality produce an affordable housing plan. These are the kinds of structural reforms that housing advocates say move the needle on construction. Rhode Island and New Hampshire have passed them at far higher rates than Connecticut, a pattern that CT Mirror documented using the Furman Center’s published data.

Rojas said Connecticut’s preferred policy tool, financial incentives for towns that build more affordable housing, has run its course.

“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 consequences of that approach play out differently across Fairfield County. In Greenwich, restrictive single-family zoning has kept density low and prices astronomical. The median single-family home sale price in Greenwich ran above $2.5 million last year. In Bridgeport, the constraint isn’t just zoning but investment, and the two cities face genuinely different barriers to housing production. A state policy that treats them identically, or leaves both to their own devices, isn’t going to solve either problem.

Rojas said he favors a more direct approach.

“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 candid.

It reflects a real tension in the General Assembly, where suburban legislators from places like Fairfield, Trumbull, and Westport have little appetite for state mandates that could reshape local zoning. Their constituents moved to those towns partly because of what the zoning produced: low density, good schools, single-family neighborhoods. Telling those voters that the state will now require more multifamily housing near transit corridors or downtown districts is a hard political sell, regardless of what the housing data shows.

Jenny Schuetz, Vice President of Infrastructure-Housing at Arnold Ventures, said the Furman Center tracker gives policymakers and journalists a tool to benchmark reform across states.

“This is going to be an incredibly useful resource, not just for researchers, for journalists who want to track things, and, of course, for policymakers who are always looking for examples of other legislation where they can get ideas (and) figure out pieces to copy,” Schuetz said.

The Furman Center has published state-level housing policy data before, but a tracker specifically designed to compare land use legislation across states gives Connecticut officials a cleaner view of where they stand. The answer, at 11 bills in nine years against Rhode Island’s 42, is not a flattering one.

The tracker is particularly useful for identifying what kinds of bills neighboring states have passed that Connecticut hasn’t. Accessory dwelling units, for instance, have been the subject of sustained legislative debate in Hartford without producing a statewide reform. Several other New England states moved faster on that single issue than Connecticut has.

The General Assembly’s housing committee has been active this session, but Rojas acknowledged that the political environment still favors the incentive model over mandates. Any push toward prescriptive state-level reform will face the same suburban opposition it has faced in prior sessions, and the tracker now provides a data-backed argument for the other side.