NORWALK, Conn. — Norwalk added more than 2,300 housing units over the past decade. Rent kept rising anyway. Why?
Housing experts say the cause runs deeper than recent construction; decades of underbuilding, a housing ladder that’s stopped moving, and a market that keeps producing the wrong types of homes.
Connecticut’s housing shortage is decades old. David Griggs, a certified economic developer and President and CEO of the MetroHartford Alliance, said construction took off nationally after World War II, then “in the late 70s, early 80s, that began to tank, and it tanked hard.”
It never fully recovered. Griggs said the state kept hitting economic setbacks, and construction never returned to its earlier pace.
“We’ve been digging a hole for 40 years, and we’ve just now stopped to take a look at how deep it is. So it’s going to take us a while to climb ourselves back out.”
President and CEO of the MetroHartford Alliance, David Griggs
“We would take a tumble, but then we would come back, but we would never come back to where we were, and that’s just continued,” he said. The 2008 housing crash was one of those setbacks, and it took Connecticut six or seven years just to get back to where the market had been before the crash.
He said that this 40-year stretch of underbuilding, not the pace of recent construction, is the real reason rent hasn’t come down.
“Depending on which study you look at, Connecticut is anywhere between 100,000 to 390,000 housing units behind what demand is.” Last year, the state issued just under 7,000 building permits statewide. “We’re absolutely not, we’re nowhere near meeting the demand,” Griggs said. “We’re putting 100 units, 500 units.”
“It’s a drop in the bucket to what we need.”
President and CEO of the MetroHartford Alliance, David Griggs
A housing stock that isn’t turning over
In a healthy market, Griggs said, young families move into a neighborhood, their kids grow up and leave, and empty nesters eventually pass the house along to the next young family.
That churn has slowed because more older residents are staying in place through what’s known as “aging in place.”
“If people aren’t giving up their house at what used to be the usual age … it creates a backlog that just goes right down the ladder,” Griggs said. “Everything just gets tighter and locked.”
Those constraints affect different generations in different ways.
At the bottom, Griggs said close to a third of Connecticut residents age 18 to 25, and about a fifth of those age 26 to 40, still live with their parents, because they can’t afford housing on their own.
At the top of the ladder, Edward Erfurt, chief technical advisor at the national nonprofit Strong Towns, pointed to the toll it takes on older residents. He cited AARP’s own research showing its members’ two biggest struggles are housing security and loneliness. Many are living alone in large homes they raised a family in, unable to afford a new roof or a broken water heater on a fixed income.
“The most sustainable communities … are the ones that have a variety of housing choices, and those choices are changing and adapting to the needs of every generation.”
Chief Technical Advisor of Strong Towns, Edward Erfurt
If they want something smaller, he said, they often have to leave their own community to find it, giving up their church, their friends, and the neighborhood they know.
The kinds of housing that are missing
Griggs said one way to loosen that gridlock for everyone is to build more condos in the same neighborhoods where people already live.
Condos alone won’t solve the shortage, he said, but they unlock one segment of the market that’s currently stuck.
A condo gives an older homeowner a real choice once a house no longer fits their life, a place that lets them reinvest what they’ve built in equity without taking on yard work or a new roof, and without having to leave the community they know. That choice has a second effect: it opens the house back up for a younger family.
But he said Norwalk doesn’t have to choose a single housing type, pointing to West Hartford as a regional example of a town that builds condos, apartments, and single-family homes side by side.
“We’re only providing two choices for people… three bedroom, two bath homes, or luxury apartments. Are we actually meeting the needs of the largest group of home buyers out there?”
Chief Technical Advisor of Strong Towns, Edward Erfurt
Griggs said most of what gets built today falls into just two categories: single-family detached homes and large apartment buildings known as “five-over-ones,” five stories of apartments over a ground floor of retail or parking. Erfurt made the same point.
Financing is built around those two products, he said, which crowds out everything in between, such as duplexes, triplexes, and small apartment buildings that used to fill the middle of the market. Griggs also pointed to mixed-use buildings, which combine apartments with retail or office space, as another underbuilt option.
He said mixed-use projects are less dependent on any single market to remain financially healthy. If office demand weakens, for example, residential or retail tenants can help support the building. While that stability doesn’t necessarily translate into lower rents for residents, it makes a broader range of projects financially feasible to build.
Beyond multi-family units, starter homes have also become increasingly rare, Griggs said. Homes that size once let families buy into a neighborhood, expand or improve the home as their income grew, or eventually sell and move up after building equity. Very little of what’s built today is anywhere near that small, he said.
For both experts, Norwalk’s recent apartment construction is only one piece of a much larger picture. They said today’s housing market reflects decades of underbuilding and a shrinking range of housing choices, trends they argue will take years, not a handful of new developments, to reverse.
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