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Opinion: Rent control won’t build the housing CT needs

Connecticut’s cost of living is high, in large part because of housing prices, and nearly everyone says the state needs much more housing, especially “affordable” housing — most of which is rental housing. But whether everyone who says the state needs more housing really believes it is a fair question.

That’s because most of the housing legislation proposed in the General Assembly wouldn’t increase the supply of housing at all. Most proposals would just scapegoat landlords, though more rental housing requires more landlords. Other proposals would just increase the dependence of renters on government.

State government action that might actually get any “affordable” housing built remains too controversial, even for many Democratic legislators who ordinarily prattle about helping the poor even as Democratic administrations lately have been grinding the poor down with inflation, high electricity prices, and ineffectual schools.

For example, Democratic legislators want a big increase in state government rent subsidies to tenants, which turn housing into political patronage and take tenants hostage.

Democrats want to forbid landlords from evicting tenants at the end of their leases without “just cause.” End-of-lease evictions undertaken so landlords can raise rents would be prohibited. This would be rent control, which never got any housing built but only destroyed the private sector’s incentive to build rental housing.

Democrats want to forbid landlords from charging more than a month’s rent for a security deposit, as if landlords shouldn’t have the right to judge how much of a deposit is necessary to protect their property against damage by tenants.

Democrats want to restrict the rent increases that can be charged upon sale of a property — more rent control.

Democrats want to require even smaller towns to establish “fair rent commissions” — still more rent control.

Legislation called “Towns Take the Lead” would require towns to set housing construction goals, but there would be no firm enforcement mechanism for achieving them.

Democrats want state government to increase its obstruction of federal immigration law enforcement and provide more medical insurance coverage to illegal immigrants, thus incentivizing more illegal immigration, even as state government has never made any provision for housing Connecticut’s estimated more than 100,000 immigration law violators.

The most helpful of the Democratic housing proposals may be the one that would formally authorize homeless people to live, eat, and sleep on public land. Connecticut has many destitute, addicted, and mentally ill people, and some of them panhandle and live largely out of sight in the woods or underbrush, but so far the state lacks anything like the sidewalk tenting camps of Los Angeles and Portland, Ore. Maybe that kind of visibility for the destitute and disturbed is necessary to get Connecticut thinking seriously about its housing policy, social disintegration, and declining living standards.

The only sure way to get a substantial amount of new housing in Connecticut is for state government to commission it directly and let landlords charge market-rate rents.

Connecticut’s cities, with their populations impoverished by state welfare and education policies and their governments surviving mainly on state financial aid, are already wards of the state. They also have large tracts of decrepit industrial and residential property already served by water, sewer, gas, and power lines and public transportation — property that practically begs for redevelopment, especially mixed-use redevelopment, with commerce at street level and residences upstairs, redevelopment that doesn’t worsen suburban sprawl.

A state redevelopment authority could be authorized to purchase or condemn such properties and provide them to developers, specifying their development format and completion schedules, while leaving rents to the market so the new properties won’t become more government-engineered slums. Cities might resent their loss of control to the state redevelopment authority but then few cities are operated well enough to deserve control of state housing policy any more than suburbs deserve to control it with their exclusive zoning.

Any new middle-class housing will help bring down the cost of all housing nearby, and the cost of living generally. If Connecticut’s decentralized political system can’t get housing built, state government will have to do it.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

Source: https://ctmirror.org/2025/03/25/rent-control-wont-build-housing-ct-needs/