12 NOON, Wednesday, July 16, 2025 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org
It is extremely expensive to have a place to live near New York City – even in southern New England and Long Island.
In the first half of the 20th century, the single family home basis of freestanding homes simply sprouted out of fallow farm lands – each on their own plot of land. After World War 2 whole neighborhoods suburbia took that fallow farmland and made instant “Bedroom Communities” before there was any land regulation now known as “Zoning”. That explosive change was facilitated by commuter trains, refrigerated food transportation and the Federal Highway System – but that change also facilitated the birth of Zoning Laws.
In most suburban communities Zoning Codes were designed to protect the value of the homes that were already built by insuring that the pattern of single family homes on individual building lots was mandated and the size and nature of new development served to perpetuate the suburban patterning that these communities were based on.
But this low density, car-dependent culture isolated commercial and civil facilities into designated town centers and made home ownership financially impossible for lower income families. As costs exploded in the last generations and the environmental effects of low-density living became known, there is a desire to change the reasoning behind Zoning from protecting and projecting existing communities – despite the extreme (and growing) problems of affordability for more and more people in America.
Connecticut and other governments have tried to facilitate, even require, the ability of our communities to adapt to this affordability crisis by revising the Zoning laws created to perpetuate the status quo: In Connecticut this means state bills that direct the more that 150 towns and cities that have in-place laws and processes that regulate land use. The latest version of that revamping of state Zoning requirements was passed by the Legislature, and vetoed by Governor Lamont after many of those towns and cities plead their case for maintaining the existing systems their communities use now.
When zoning changes (and it will) how will houses change? How will communities change? Will there be new ways of living together be facilitated by land use regulations? Second homes on existing single family home sites (Accessory Dwelling Units), income regulated multifamily housing new construction, co-housing, unrelated people living together as a family are all being executed now: but what are the ways a new generation of houses will create the housing we need to change the prohibitive costs?