At the close of the Second World War, there was a great migration from the southern states of the country to the coasts, along with a postwar baby boom. This influx of additional people caused well-meaning and thoughtful civic leaders to try to find ways to house this overflow of people and family growth. One solution was rental “projects housing,” creating small apartments of many sizes with attractive landscapes to give the residents a feeling of home. And the projects sprung up everywhere. Father Panik Village in Bridgeport, CT. Southfield Village in Stamford. Arnold Court in Greenwich, and the masterful Cabrini Green in Chicago, IL. Starting with visions of success, failure came. Combinations of the welfare system, the destruction of the nuclear family via that same welfare system, drugs, alcoholism, crime, and abandonment caused these projects to meet the wrecker’s ball, crumbling into the dust of needles and shell casings left long before. Families that stayed together followed the original intention of the projects and saved money and moved out to homes of their very own. City mismanagement caused the buildings to wear out much sooner than expected. Overall, it was a pitiful debacle, and the wrecker's ball was the punctuation ending this sad and failed chapter in history.
After this wasteful disaster of epic proportions, one sad lesson was learned: Housing provided without the opportunity of ownership and preserving one’s investment was invariably headed to ruin. However, developments such as New York’s “Co-Op City” and “Cooper Village” provided ownership and equity and have succeeded for decades. So, one would think that to provide success in housing other than abject failure, one would not try to do the exact same approach that failed decades ago and expect a different result.
A place where cries of an “affordable housing shortage” have caused the serial building of monstrous apartment developments that stamp out any semblance of local zoning and community character, as we find these housing monstrosities are entirely unaffordable due to dead business and salary growth in Connecticut. Therefore these developments head to the express lane to be the Cabrini Greens and Father Panik Villages of the future.
A place where no decent and durable housing can be built as the combination of a dead economy, a welfare-state environment, contaminated zoning laws, and the sheer cost of doing so makes all that a losing proposition not worth the risk for any builder or contractor in his or her right mind.
But never fear! Whenever there is a social or community need that good old economic principles are not permitted to deal with, you can rest assured that a combination of politicians, community activists, “religious leaders” grossly overpaid “nonprofit heads” and “housing advocates” will step in to make a bad result, even unthinkably worse.
And worse leads to what we already know.
Housing affordability? For things to be affordable, people must be able to produce sufficient income in order to afford them. “Connecticut gets an "F" on housing affordability screams a recent headline so states a recent report by Realtor.com.” Connecticut ranked 46th out of 50 in the report. The median household income is just over $95,000 per year in the state, and the median listing price for a home is just over $500,000. “We need more homes, we need more multifamily homes, those missing middle options. But really, we need a combination of all those strategies for Connecticut to catch up to our peers,” Chelsea Ross with Partnership for Strong Communities said. (https://www.wtnh.com/news/connecticut/new-haven/connecticut-receives-f-for-housing-affordability-and-availability-in-new-report/)
The report itself should be must reading for those running for office in the November election, presuming they possess the basic comprehension skills in order to do so. Housing is a complete debacle for Connecticut, in contrast to the billions of dollars that have and will be spent on the guise of "affordable housing". "If the top of the class reshuffled, the bottom barely moved at all. Connecticut (No. 46, F), California (No. 47, F), Hawaii (No. 48, F), Massachusetts (No. 50, F), and Oregon (No. 45, D-) all hold the same rankings as last year...These states face structural challenges such as high prices, constrained land, restrictive zoning, and building costs that far outpace what middle-income buyers can afford. (https://www.realtor.com/research/state-report-cards-2026/)
Many find it fascinating that with the amount of Connecticut Taxpayer funded programs and "nonprofits" for "affordable housing" through tax credits, subsidies to municipalities and other programs, Connecticut continues its race to the bottom of both a shortage of housing and the affordability of housing. It is also important to note and is left out of the debate, is that Connecticut has one of the highest property rates in the country, with such rate increases attributable in many cases to waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication of services as opposed to consolidation. It is ranked third in the country for highest property tax rates with a real estate tax rate of about 1.54% to 1.66% of a property's assessed value. The logical question would be wouldn't the lowering of property tax rates in turn lower property and rental costs? That simple question seems lost in the race to control zoning by an elite political few, who, while living in their Greenwich mansions, demand a lower standard of housing that they can profit from in the guise of "affordable housing" while, (like Ned and Annie Lamont with Annie’s equity interest in benefit provider “Unite Us”), can sit back and reap the benefits of this obfuscation and exploitation of the relative underclass.
There are many free-market solutions to lower the costs of housing and rents in Connecticut. The solutions have worked before and will work today. However, since the "non-profit affordable housing" industry is drive by profit and control and facilitated by overpaid bureaucrats, professional panderers. and Executive Directors, these solutions will never be mentioned. Connecticut's ruling Democrat elite savor and profit by bottom-feeding off the pitiful economic conditions that exist in the state while not paying the debts they create, thereby adding to the $100-150 billion dollars in short- and long-term debt and unfunded liabilities. Meanwhile a cacophony of activists, do-gooders, and suffering Sams and Sallies are quick to call anyone a racist, (or even worse, a Trump supporter), for calling this horrific mess to task.
One really does not need to read a report or listen to the comments of this chorus of failure to understand what is really happening. Just see what is happening around you. And to the cacophony of the hacks, just keep it up. For it is certain that if they keep it up, housing will never be affordable in this state.