The state legislature’s Democratic supermajority last week rammed through a bill that’s a thinly disguised socialist wishlist.
Cynically couched as a remedy for the affordable housing crisis, its real purpose is ideological: forcing Connecticut’s 169 towns to achieve what the bill calls “economic diversity.”(HB8002: Lines 701,859)
Translation: If you’ve worked hard to own a home in a leafy suburb with quiet streets, you can’t live there unless everybody can — including those with low incomes and even the homeless.
The state, through regional councils, will dictate how many people at each income level a town must house.
The councils are mere middlemen, a cosmetic addition to paper over a fundamental loss of local control.
This isn’t about allowing one apartment building in a town of single-family homes; up to 20% of a town’s housing will have to be “affordable” rentals. (HB8002: Line 1012)
The bill even forces towns to let the homeless sleep-in local parks or camp on sidewalks, despite the risk of crime and disorder. Public safety be damned.
Gov. Ned Lamont, seeking a third term in 2026 and fearing a challenge on his left flank, called the legislature into special session to pass this bill — and it did at 1 a.m. Friday, with zero Republican votes.
GOP state Sen. Rob Sampson, who called the measure “very coercive,” warned that towns will soon “look like what the state of Connecticut decides,” losing their local character.
Republicans predicted it will push up property taxes, already among the nation’s highest.
To accommodate new apartment buildings, towns with mostly single-family housing will get clobbered with huge costs to install sewers and water lines, and to add transportation and school capacity.
Homeownership will actually get more out of reach.
If Democrats were honestly concerned with improving affordability, they’d seek to add rentals where they’re most needed — in cities like Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven — where the infrastructure for housing density already exists.
Connecticut’s extreme bill is strikingly different from the housing efforts other states and cities have launched.
Eighteen states and Gotham’s own “City of Yes” program are permitting basement apartments and backyard cottages.
Montana is allowing conversions of commercial space like vacant malls into apartment complexes and easing parking requirements to one space per rental unit.
Texas reduced lot-size requirements, but only for new residential tracts — not existing neighborhoods.
In contrast, Connecticut’s bill affects every town and eliminates parking requirements entirely for many buildings — a looming nightmare for small towns with narrow residential streets.
Democrats are giving a middle finger to locals who value their villages’ traditional New England charm.
Towns that don’t comply face draconian penalties — losing any right to appeal when developers arrive with affordable housing plans of their own.
During the Senate proceedings, Democratic Majority Leader Bob Duff sneered at Republicans’ objections, instructing his members to vote against every GOP amendment without debate.
But Duff and the Democrats don’t seem to understand the issues at hand.
When Sampson challenged a provision outlawing “hostile architecture” — public seating with dividers and arm rests, meant to keep homeless people from sleeping on them — Duff railed that unaffordable housing forces the poor to sleep rough. (HB8002: Lines 1843, 1849)
No, Sampson replied, “people are not homeless because there are no rents available”; mental illness and drug addiction are the major causes.
Sampson nailed it. The new law will bring discarded syringes, human waste and crime to Connecticut’s streets and parks.
Forget allowing your kids to walk around town alone.
The Democrats’ housing bill imagines these people will peacefully settle into newly constructed apartment units throughout the state.
That’s dangerously misguided.
A formerly homeless tenant mainstreamed into an apartment is likely to harass and assault other tenants, set fires, or even cede the space to drug dealers or other criminals, studies have found.
Last week, President Donald Trump informed the homeless-advocacy-industrial complex that to get federal money, they must abandon the “Housing First” approach that fails to treat the addictions and illnesses that drive homelessness in the first place.
Yet Lamont and his lefty allies, just like Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, vow not to remove the homeless from the streets or commit them to mental health or drug treatment against their will.
It’s sheer lunacy — and so is Connecticut’s top-down housing bill.
When Lamont signs it into law, as he has vowed to do, he will sabotage his state’s towns, damaging them irreversibly. The need for affordable housing is urgent, but this is no way to meet it.
