Group offers ideas to build affordable housing

Alex Wood | Journal Inquirer

GLASTONBURY — The town could do its share to meet the Hartford area’s affordable housing needs through measure such as allowing multifamily developments on lots now limited to single-family homes, using town-owned land for multifamily housing, and allowing redevelopment of underused office buildings as apartments.

Those are among the suggestions of the Vernon-based Tyche Planning and Policy Group, which was hired by the Glastonbury group TALK Inc. and the Hartford-based Open Communities Alliance with a grant from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

Tyche co-founder John Guszkowski presented the firm’s report in a teleconference Tuesday evening. It is available on the Open Communities website: www.ctoca.org/publications

Open Communities is part of a coalition of organizations calling for Connecticut to adopt a “fair share” affordable housing system, modeled on New Jersey’s, in which the state would determine the need for affordable housing and require each town to meet a share of the need.

Towns would then figure out how to provide their share of the affordable housing, with limitations such as not creating “undue concentrations of households living in poverty.”

Open Communities estimates Glastonbury’s “fair share” to be 1,550 affordable housing units over the next 10 years, according to the Tyche report.