CT Lawmakers Reject New Fire and Building Code Over Housing

Connecticut’s updated building and fire code is dead for now, after lawmakers on the Regulation Review Committee voted Tuesday to reject the proposal from the Department of Administrative Services. The vote split along party lines, driven largely by concerns that new fire safety requirements would make it even harder to build housing in a state already struggling with a shortage of affordable places to live.

The rejected code had been years in the making. Connecticut updates its building and fire codes on a four-year cycle, and those rules shape nearly every detail of how new construction proceeds across the state. This cycle’s proposal arrived at a politically charged moment, with housing advocates and pro-development lawmakers scrutinizing any regulation that might slow or block new projects.

Three provisions drew the sharpest criticism.

The first would have required wider access roads near certain features like fire hydrants. Under the proposal, those roads would need to be 26 feet wide rather than the current 20 feet for new multifamily developments. DAS officials argued the change would improve safety and align Connecticut with international fire code standards. Critics pushed back. Housing advocates submitted letters arguing there was no evidence the existing 20-foot roads had created safety problems, and Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, raised concerns about roads where a wider requirement simply couldn’t be met. She pointed to Route 138, bordered by a river and a ledge, as an example of where the new standard would be physically impossible to achieve.

The second provision would have given local fire officials discretion over which side of a building must face an access road. State Fire Marshal Lauri Volkert offered a reasonable-sounding rationale: a building might have inoperable windows on one face and accessible balconies on another, and fire officials would logically want road access on the balcony side. But housing advocates worried the policy would hand local officials an effective veto over new construction projects, with few limits on how that discretion could be exercised. Nick Kantor, program director of Pro-Homes Connecticut, described the provision in a letter to lawmakers as creating “unwieldy local discretion.”

The third provision would have limited new developments to sites located closer to existing access roads, further constraining where housing could be built.

The committee’s rejection came after an earlier round of controversy over a separate provision. Earlier in the session, lawmakers repealed a measure that would have allowed a single stairway as a means of egress in certain multi-family buildings. Single-stair construction, which is common in Europe and increasingly championed by pro-housing groups in the United States, allows for more efficient building footprints and can make smaller residential projects more financially viable. DAS pulled that version of the code and removed the single-stair language, but the revised proposal still couldn’t survive legislative review.

The Open Communities Alliance, a housing advocacy group, framed the vote in stark terms. “In the midst of an ongoing state housing crisis, where affordable housing units are in ever-higher demand, we must scrutinize potential regulations that appear well-intentioned but would in fact have a harmful effect on the state and its residents,” the group wrote in a letter to lawmakers.

Osten, who voted against the code, put it plainly. “Housing is supposed to be one of our most important things, but we don’t want to make the rules so heavy-handed that we can’t do that housing,” she said.

The vote reflects a broader tension playing out in legislatures across the country, as housing advocates push to reform building and fire codes that were written for a different era and a different set of priorities. Connecticut’s shortage of affordable housing has intensified pressure on lawmakers to remove obstacles to new construction wherever they find them, including in technical regulatory documents that rarely attract public attention.

What comes next for the state’s building and fire code is unclear. DAS will need to decide whether to revise and resubmit the proposal or let the existing code continue to govern construction in the state. Either path carries real consequences for developers, municipalities, and the tens of thousands of Connecticut residents who cannot find affordable places to live.