Tim Tai

Amid statewide housing shortages and perennially rising rents, housing quickly became a key issue in the first month of Connecticut’s 2025 legislative session. A total of 136 bills have been registered with the General Assembly’s Housing Committee, as of Jan. 28. And at the start of the session, Governor Ned Lamont promised to invest nearly $60 million in housing opportunities for residents struggling with opioid abuse and mental illness. 

State officials are not the only power players investing in housing policy this session. They join a large chorus of voices — including activists and New Haven officials — calling for action on a host of issues, such as affordable housing options, zoning reform, tenant protections and homelessness.

Organizers promote tenants’ rights, transit-oriented housing

Grassroots efforts have taken center stage in that chorus.

Connecticut Tenants Union, for instance, is at the helm of a campaign for just cause legislation, which would guard against no-fault and “lapse of time” evictions after a tenant’s lease has run out. According to Luke Melakanos-Harrison, vice president of the CTTU, this type of eviction comprises 10 percent of evictions statewide.  

“[Just cause] basically takes away the number one way that we have seen abuses of power happen to intimidate and retaliate against tenants,” Melakanos-Harrison said. “Additionally, just cause will help slow down the investment strategy that’s running rampant in Connecticut right now, which involves speculative investors basically counting on being able to evict all of the tenants often to do a shoddy renovation job that’s cheaply done, and then double the rent.”

On Thursday, 10 state representatives stood with tenant organizers and proposed HB 6348 “to expand the protection of just cause eviction to all tenants.”

As the session moves forward, CT Tenants Union anticipates pushback from property owners and legislators who are landlords themselves. But Melakanos-Harrison is confident in the power of tenant advocacy.

“Tenants were not really participating in the political process until the past handful of sessions,” Melakanos-Harrison explained. “The Housing Committee has often been a low-profile committee that wasn’t getting a ton of attention and whatnot. And I think that the tenant movement in recent years has been changing that for the better.”

Activists are also organizing for Work Live Ride, a bill that has made rounds in the state legislature for the past three years. The bill would offer monetary support to municipalities that invest in affordable housing development near transit hubs such as train stations or bus stops. 

DesegregateCT, the coalition championing the bill, aims to fight suburban sprawl, or the overdevelopment of spaced-out single-family housing outside cities. The coalition claims the phenomenon promotes de facto racial segregation, inhibits the job market and threatens the environment.

“The amount of sprawl that we’ve seen in Connecticut is not economically feasible,” said Sebastian Torres, the policy director for DesegregateCT. “It is creating housing that no one can afford and is not taking proper utilization of different methods of transportation and all the work that the state and cities have put into building up their own towns and their capacities.”

Along with Work Live Ride, DesegregateCT and its dozens of member organizations are backing the Tenants Union’s just cause efforts, as well as increasing funding for the state’s Renters’ Assistance Program, which helps protect low-income families from homelessness.

City leaders push for state support on development, homelessness

For years, New Haven has come under fire from activists for its management of the city’s homelessness crisis and rental market. But Mayor Justin Elicker maintains that while the city is making an earnest effort to address both issues, meaningful progress will require state support.

According to Elicker, the city is particularly interested in a housing growth fund to supplement municipalities’ work on affordable housing construction.

“A lot of cities and towns are reluctant to grow and to build, and we’re just the opposite,” Elicker said. “We really want to build, but oftentimes, if we’re requiring a lot of affordable and deeply affordable units, it’s very expensive, and we need to find funding to close the gap on what it would cost to build at market rate versus what it would cost to build at market rate and affordable.”

Elicker also called for state support in building “supportive housing” for unhoused people, as well as assistance combating the substance abuse and mental health crises that often accompany housing insecurity. 

John DeStefano, former New Haven mayor of 20 years, said that housing is a state issue, which can’t be resolved through city-focused efforts alone. He lamented the state’s failure to set specific unit construction goals and general “lack of specific vision” in addressing  housing concerns.

DeStefano recommends that state legislators subsidize market-rate housing for middle-income, early-career home buyers, who he says are increasingly struggling to find affordable options.

“There are lots of folks who are working that have two adults in the household, who are facing challenges being able to afford a home that, frankly, my generation never faced,” DeStefano said. “So I think we’ve lost focus on staying in the middle part of the market, which I think would provide relief on the pressure of the conversion of affordable units to market rate units – i.e. gentrification.”

The Connecticut General Assembly’s regular session runs through June 4.