CT's housing crisis is bleeding into 2025. From homelessness to development, can lawmakers fix it?
Alex Putterman | CT Insider
With vacancy rates low, rents high, home-ownership out of reach for many residents and homelessness rising year after year, Connecticut clearly has a housing problem.
The question, posed annually around this time, is what state lawmakers might do about it.
In recent years, Connecticut's legislature has considered sweeping proposals to reshape housing policy in the state, only to land on more modest solutions. This has increasingly irked advocates, who say the state is short more than 98,000 affordable rental units.
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House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, said the legislature will likely revisit some previous proposals this year while also looking into some new ones, such as promoting the creation of more public housing. Speaker of the House Matt Ritter has said lawmakers are at work on a large housing bill that will be a priority for his caucus.
Rojas, who has described Connecticut's progress on housing as "painfully incremental," says now is the time to get serious.
"We have a crisis in the moment, and we're going to have a crisis 10 years from now," he said. "And it'll be worse if we don't act now."