Support provided by Connecituct Humanities and the Connecticut Fair Housing Center (door opening) (electronic beeping) - [Carlos] Oh, papi, hi.

(door shutting) - Hello.

- Seatbelt.

(mechanism clicking) - It was good, Dad.

- Yep.

It's in my backpack.

(crowd clamoring) (crowd applauding) - My fellow state officials.

Honored guests.

And the people of the great state of Connecticut.

Unlike our neighboring states, which are losing population, Connecticut has gained population over each of the last few years.

Today we have more people working, more people starting businesses, more people joining labor unions with better pay and better benefits.

More of our graduates staying in Connecticut.

And more out-of-staters wanting to move to Connecticut.

One warning sign.

We have too many people who cannot find a place to live.

Either it's not available or it's not affordable.

(pensive minimal music) - So, the housing crisis in Connecticut is desperate.

And there are really two ways to talk about it.

One is to just look at the numbers.

You know, we are the ninth or tenth most expensive housing state in the country.

Families would have to work 79 hours a week at minimum wage to afford the average two bedroom.

We have one of the lowest vacancy rates for rental units in the entire country.

We have exceptionally high housing costs.

So, all of these things are serious problems.

The other piece is the human story.

It is taking families, even with vouchers, months and months and months to find a place to live.

- One of the driving factors, if not the driving factor, is lack of supply.

There has been a marked decrease in the last decade in the production of new housing.

Particularly in the places where people most would like to live.

A lot of what drives that lack of supply is local decisions about whether to permit a developer to actually develop.

- You have places that have extreme wealth where there's no chance for a moderately-income family, let alone a low-income family to move in.

- Most of these communities actually have no problem with developing really expensive housing.

It only raises the question when it's multifamily, or affordable, or low income that suddenly nobody wants development.

I think that's been the history of housing in our country, where housing has often been a flashpoint politically for communities because of issues in race and class, which we've struggled with as a country.

(pensive music continues) - Poverty and housing are so connected.

Poverty creates so many social and economic problems where people live.

And we need to both improve housing opportunity in some of those areas, but we also need to create the ability of people to move out of those neighborhoods and to move into better housing.

That's why, again, following Dr. Martin Luther King, when he said housing is the incomplete of the major civil rights.

(somber minimal music) (items rustling) (distant traffic rumbling) (somber music continues) (somber music continues) - There's tons of research that shows that you shouldn't be spending more than 30% of your income on housing.

The way that our housing situation is set up, a lot of people are spending almost all their income.

There's been some research from the Department of Housing that quantifies just how many people are housing-burdened.

And it's well over a hundred thousand households.

That's the crisis that Connecticut's facing.

(birds chirping) (distant vehicle rumbling) - Where do we go from here in Connecticut?

We have tremendous battles over housing.

How can we make it more affordable?

Where can it be built?

And I think one way to look about how to move forward when you're in trouble is to figure out, how did we get here?

100 years ago, a Jewish grocer from Hartford named Jacob Goldberg wanted to build a store here.

He had all the right permits, he had everything lined up, but town residents and town leadership shut it down.

They wouldn't let him build.

Now, Goldberg eventually won in court, and he got permission to build, Kingswood Market is what he called it.

Now, more recent restaurants and a beauty parlor.

But what it set off was the town of West Hartford went to the state legislature and they wanted permission and got permission to do zoning.

Now, zoning meant that they didn't have to make necessarily individual decisions about Goldberg, but they could make blanket decisions that would determine how land would be used.

That shapes the world we live in today, because zoning is still with us.

Zoning by definition isn't inherently bad.

We have all sorts of reasons why we do wanna have zoning for public good.

For example, you don't wanna have a toxic waste factory right next door to a childcare center.

So those separation of maybe residential, industrial purposes, that makes sense for zoning, that's a progressive value in zoning.

But what we're looking at here is exclusionary zoning.

That refers to policies that favor more expensive single family home construction and the people who can afford to live there over more affordable multi-family construction.

West Hartford began leading the way to set into place rules that could economically segregate who could live where.

So West Hartford leaders hire consultant Robert Whitten, and Whitten draws out a very interesting plan in the preamble of the West Hartford zoning plan.

Whitten writes that all different types of people will be able to live in West Hartford.

While he was also working in the 1920s in places like Atlanta, Georgia, White segregationists wanted him in Atlanta to create race-based zoning.

In fact, literally the plans that Robert Whitten wrote up for Atlanta showed these were gonna be the white zones, and in the language of the times, these were gonna be the colored zones.

Even though the US Supreme Court prohibited race-based zoning in its 1917 decision, Robert Whitten created those plans for Atlanta.

Now, when we look at Connecticut and what was happening here in the north, we see more of a Northern-style racism.

Robert Whitten knew exactly what type of exclusionary zoning would be legal in Connecticut in the long run, and they came up with rules that never mentioned race, or religion, or a nationality.

Instead, what you'll see are these economic strategies of having wealth-based restrictions.

When you look across the street here, you'll notice these are duplex homes, two family homes.

You can see two front doors, two mailboxes.

And these in general, are more affordable to live in, because they're sharing a roof, they're sharing a lot of land.

What is interesting about exclusionary zoning is, these are illegal to build in most neighborhoods in West Hartford today.

Now, some of these are here because they were built prior to the 1924 zoning plan.

But what happened afterwards is, the town of West Hartford implemented rules that made it uneconomic to build two or three family homes on a small slice of land.

The town wanted single family homes, and the way they got that was to make the rules so that you had to have minimum land requirements per family.

And what did that do?

That made the rest of the housing much more expensive, and that effectively limited who could afford to come and live in West Hartford.

Exclusionary zoning carved up West Hartford into five zones: A, B, C, D, and E. So Zone A was the most exclusive.

The rules required that any homes being constructed there must have 9,000 square feet, about 1/5 of an acre per family.

That's modest by today's standards.

But at the time, that was a significant amount of real estate that someone had to purchase in order to put a family home on there.

At the other end, Zone, C, D, and E would allow multi-family housing, duplexes, or apartment buildings, but they could only happen in very small segments of the town.

You had to have this much money to buy this much land to construct a single family home in these exclusive neighborhoods, which resulted in the same outcomes of having a racially homogenous neighborhood.

- As was the case in many states around the country, Connecticut started to ratchet up its exclusionary zoning laws in the post-war period, particularly in the 1970s and '80s.

Things like increasing the minimum lot size were pretty popular in high income suburban neighborhoods and communities.

So, local zoning laws had the effect of creating a constrained supply, which persists to this day, because those exclusionary zoning laws have by and large not been reconsidered in the highest income communities in the state.

The Connecticut zoning atlas was motivated by questions that we got from people who were asking the Desegregate Connecticut Coalition, why do you say that zoning is a problem if you don't even know what the zoning codes say?

So we read 32,000 pages of zoning codes across the state of Connecticut.

Reading all of those zoning codes and tying regulatory characteristics to geospatial data for the first time, enabled us to have a map that showed people not only how zoning worked in their own communities, but how zoning codes work in comparison to other communities in the same area, region, and across the state.

And we found across Connecticut that 91% of land allows for single family housing as of right, and only 2% of land in Connecticut allows for four or more family housing as of right.

That stark difference, 2% versus 91%, showed us definitively that zoning was at the root of at a minimum housing affordability issues.

But going deeper than that, probably at the root of some of the income-based and race and ethnicity-based segregation that we can see with our bare eyes across Connecticut.

- My take on this is, I'm thrilled to see more attention over the years to race-based housing discrimination, especially in the form of redlining, which we saw the federal government enacting in the 1930s, race restrictive covenants, which we've seen in Connecticut and other places in the 1940s.

But I wanna make an argument that prior to that, in the 1920s, Connecticut was leading the pack with exclusionary zoning, which used the language of wealth restrictions, not race-based restrictions, but these wealth restrictions of economic segregation determining what properties could be built in what locations, and what kind of people could afford to live in those neighborhoods.

That circumvented the race-based civil rights laws that passed in the '60s and '70s that got rid of a lot of the exclusionary explicit racist practices of redlining or restrictive covenants.

But we still have this economic segregation of exclusionary zoning with us today.

It's perfectly legal, unfortunately, under current law.

- Okay, Papi, you ready to go look at a house?

All right, let's go take a look at this house.

Let's see if we like it.

This house is lit.

You wanna take off your shoes?

- [Joshua] Just wear my socks.

- [Shanay] Guess what, Joshua?

- What?

- [Shanay] I bought this house.

(Shanay laughing) - Let's go!

- [Shanay] Here's the keys.

- Let's go!

(Shanay laughing) Let's go!

- [Shanay] You're happy?

- Yes.

- [Shanay] Okay, Mommy gotta unlock it.

- Christian, Mommy just told me that we just bought this house.

- [Christian] Say, what?

- Mom just told me that we just bought this house.

- [Shanay] Take your shoes off, baby, take your shoes off.

- [Christian] Wait, she did?

- Yes, she bought a house.

I was like, "Let's go!"

- [Christian] That's good, that's great.

(Shanay laughing) - [Shanay] So beautiful.

(Joshua gasping) - An electric stove!

Yes!

- That was the greatest feeling for me to finally give them more space and we can call this home, like, that meant the world to me.

♪ We got a house ♪ We got a house ♪ We got a, we got a, we got a house ♪ (Shanay giggling) During the period where I struggled with housing, it was because I had just went through a whole domestic violence ordeal.

So now when I'm having to leave the home, I'm having to figure out where do I go.

I have no money, I'm very low income.

It's not one of those things where you can get on a list and just automatically go.

So that was definitely a struggle.

So I went through a period, I would say three years, where I just lived in different hotel settings until I could no longer afford it.

I took the advice of some friends and I went into the shelter system.

Very difficult period, but it was a life-changing experience for me.

And doing that, I was able to get case managed, and as I got case managed, they put me into transitional housing.

What that meant was I had to go into the housing, stay there for a certain period of time before I could even get a voucher to apply for actual housing.

So I lived there, and I did that, actually, I stayed there for six years.

- [Christian] There was already coffee.

- Oh, the coffee, that's right, I made it and then left it.

Thank you.

Trying to find affordable housing was so interesting.

Now that I had a voucher, it did not mean that I can just move anywhere, because there were places that didn't even wanna deal with people with vouchers.

And if they were accepting vouchers, they weren't in the best of areas, and then you had to make sure that it was a certain amount.

So I believe my voucher was about $1,100, and apartments here in Middletown are literally starting at like $1,500.

I know people that end up leaving either the town or the state overall, because they just could not find anything within that price range for the voucher or they just felt like they were gonna get something better in another area.

Just a quick question to the applicant, the transitional housing, like, what demographic is it serving?

Is it for like, people that are homeless, or like, who is this to serve?

I got into zoning.

It's interesting, I didn't even know I was into it when I actually got involved in it.

I was just doing things in the community, I was doing things for youth, I was doing things for women that have gone through similar situations as me.

I lived in what's considered our north end and that is the low-income blighted area of Middletown.

And I saw so much, being there for six years, I was like, "No, we need this and we need that," and those are the things that we focus on in zoning.

And now when I'm on the commission, I sit here and I think about housing a lot of times and how can we have affordable housing?

What is the reason that we have such a huge impact when it comes to families looking for it?

What is missing?

- The character, integrity, stability, tranquility, and wellbeing of established Norwalk resident zones must not be altered or compromised in order for more people to reside in Norwalk.

- Once somebody who's trying to build housing is forced to go through some kind of approvals process, you kinda open the door to all kinds of complaints and concerns raised by people who would prefer not to see that housing built.

It's not that it's impossible to have reasonable concerns, I suppose, but more often than not, you see things that are pretty unreasonable.

- I most definitely and vociferously against the proposal to downgrade single-family housing zones to multi-family zones.

(crowd applauding) - So there was a Federal court case out of the Second Circuit in 2016, and in the opinion, the judges say, we can see past what people were saying to find racial animus.

Like, a finder of fact could see these things and find that there was racial animus.

And they actually provided this list based on this case of things that people said.

So this is this, meaning multi-family housing.

This is why I left, insert the name of a much more racially diverse and class diverse place that you left.

- Is this what you had in mind?

Stacking one high-density development after another until this part of Mansfield resembles Route 30 in Vernon and we lose the special character of our town in this area?

- Children, right, people who live in the suburbs love kids until the kids are poor.

So they mean kids that they worry are gonna bring down those test scores or who they don't want their kids playing with or what have you.

Density, in general, small units, right?

You know, local public infrastructure is gonna be overrun.

So, oh, this apartment building's near a park, the park's gonna be too crowded.

- Everybody drives here.

I can't get from where I live by the golf course to the beach, takes me sometimes 45 minutes.

- Loitering, oh, people are gonna be hanging out outside.

Noise, crime, obviously.

- Mansfield has a low crime rate currently with a total of 120 crimes between violent and property annually.

Just curious if this will change with the addition of more low-income housing, we'll be putting our current residents at risk.

- Those are all pretty common.

Then sometimes you'll hear like, the completely off-the-wall, so a couple years ago, the Merritt Parkway Conservancy came out and said, "Well, if there's an apartment building "visible from the parkway, "it'll diminish the experience of drivers "if they have to look at an apartment building."

Some of the kind of pro-exclusionary zoning forces that we have in Connecticut right now have described zoning officials as environmental protection agencies, as mini EPAs, and that's just not what they are.

- One thing that just wanna mention is there's a tremendous amount of, what do you call it?

- Milkweed.

- Thank you, of milkweed, tremendous amount of milkweed, which is very important for monarch butterflies.

And there are lots of other things there as well, because I walk over there all the time.

- And if they were, they wouldn't be made up of appointed or elected volunteers.

We would staff them with scientists and experts who knew something about the environment.

But that's not what they are and that's not what they were ever intended to be.

The environmental agencies and the wetlands agencies and the sewer authorities and the like all exist for a reason.

- You've put so much time and energy in trying to do this, hundreds and hundreds of hours, it's failed, people don't want it.

Why don't you understand that?

- Sometimes, it saddens me that, you know, a lot of my own people do not come to these meetings because they may not understand some of it.

Now, me being on the commission, the biggest impact for me, and I'll be perfectly honest, I'm the only person of color, and I've been the only person of color since I was first elected in 2019.

And I don't think that a lot of people, especially a lot of people of color, understand what zoning really is.

They don't realize it's one of the most important commissions in the community.

A lot of times, you have people that may be against something that sounds like a really, really great idea, and you have all these people that come out and speak against it.

A lot of times, you do not find people of color in the room.

It is usually people that don't look like me in the room arguing why it should not exist.

And I will also be supporting this as well, once you mentioned it was low-income housing, I'm very familiar with the area, I was just over there today.

So yes, I will definitely be supporting it.

But I would love to see more people of color come out to these things, because then when something comes out, they're like, "Well, I don't like it," but you didn't come out to either be for it or against it to give us your opinion and how it could impact you overall.

I'm not the savior of everybody of color, so I'm only one person, but I have to think like that since I feel like it's some weight on my shoulders in a sense.

Loved it.

- Yeah.

- The questions that I asked were things that I would've spoken to before, but I don't wanna give my commentary ahead of time, obviously, but yeah.

- We end up here 'cause the landlord got us evicted, me and my daughter.

And I even told the landlord that I will pay for the time that was missed.

And he said, "No, we don't want the money.

We just want you out."

He even said it into the courtroom, "We didn't want your money.

We just want you out."

(background chatter) - Tammy and Zaela have been with us about eight months is my guess.

I think most people are fearful of shelter.

So Tammy was just, "Zaela, we're gonna eat our meals in our bed.

We're going to not leave and see the other people in the community room."

But eventually they come out 'cause they've gotten to know people.

Life changes 'cause they see how nice everybody else is and they have a comfort level.

(kids playing) I think that Tammy has shared with you her health issues.

So we're always aware of them and concerned but she is so cheerful.

- My diagnosis from my heart condition is for like a 70-year-old would have, is called sick sinus syndrome.

There's no cure for sick sinus.

Pacemaker just helps to maintain it, but you can't fix it.

(traffic whizzes) - People think of Litchfield County as a very affluent area of the state and that we wouldn't have homeless and yet we certainly do.

We're well over 100 homeless people and our shelter can only take 15.

Our staff and shelter are so underfunded, you know we're barely above minimum wage and people will take another job.

We don't receive all the funds through Department of Housing, gets HUD funds.

I'm fundraising.

I'm a nonprofit to keep our doors open.

So we get a portion of the funds, thank heaven, but it's not all of the money needed to keep our shelter doors open.

(gentle music) - This is the last one.

Oh no, nevermind.

- When folks enter shelter, their number one goal with us is to get you into housing.

So that's been a challenge for us, especially since the pandemic, because there seems to be a real shortage of affordable housing for them and they're on very limited funding.

In order to have their rent, many of them will be in subsidized programs, thank goodness.

And the goal is for those that are able, they'll be working.

And we have working poor with us already.

- [Tammy] The voucher was denied.

That's what happened with the old place 'cause of the eviction.

Right now just waiting to see if qualify for apartment.

I sent a application out is for Meriden, Connecticut, is for a two bedroom.

I just hope we could get that.

- When you ask what's up with landlords, I think the most simple response is they're taking advantage of a market that doesn't really restrain them.

They're allowed to charge more in rent.

They're allowed to increase rent double digits.

They're allowed to evict people for no cause.

Connecticut laws don't protect those who have new ownership under them.

So unfortunately, if your property, where you've lived and rented for years, is purchased by a new owner, there's not a lot you can do to remain there if they want you out.

Those protections just aren't in place in Connecticut.

- [Liz] It's me and all that is here, because we all grew up.

I grew old here.

And I've been living here for 34 years in Coleman Towers.

I once owned a co-op, but things went bad, and now I'm no longer a homeowner.

- One of the residents did call me and say that certain individuals had received a letter telling them they needed to be out of their homes in 30 days.

My concern was to get legal aid involved, and to speak to the owner and management about, why is that happening, and have you followed proper procedures?

- [Liz] When I received the letter, I was assuming and under the assumption that I was gonna go to a one bedroom.

I was told by a certain person that I was gonna be in a one bedroom.

Even though it was like a blow, from a two bedroom all these years into a one, I would've accepted a one bedroom.

But instead I received a memo, I think it was in February, stating that I would be going to efficiency.

And I said, no, I'm not gonna go into efficiency.

I mean, you're taking away all my dignity.

- When you go from a one bedroom apartment, whatever that square footage is here, and you end up in a studio, when really it's an efficiency, studio is just a $500 word.

And you know these people are not children, they got some meat on their bones.

How do they walk around those places?

How do you, if you're in a wheelchair and have medical devices, unpack your stuff when everything is on your bed, on your stove, no pathway?

There's no sufficient closets.

And then what is being done to help them store their belongings?

And is it ethical to tell people, you need to sell stuff, get rid of stuff?

Is that what we're about?

Well, I wouldn't wanna get rid of my things.

This is horrific.

- [Marva] I've been at Coleman Towers since 1980.

Oh, it was wonderful.

I had a three bedroom apartment, raising two nephews.

Then I moved to a two bedroom, which was okay.

And now I'm here in this little dungeon.

Well, they told us that they were renovating.

They sent us a notice, and they told us everybody would have to move.

So everybody from the second floor to the fourth floor had already moved.

So they went higher up to empty apartments, and they started all the demolition and everything, a lot of noise early in the morning.

A lot of noise, a lot of dust.

And we had to walk through that.

The floors were messed up.

I mean, it was a mess.

Like right now I need to do laundry.

They don't have the laundry room set up here yet.

Even if they did, the little bit of water that comes in the washing machines, that doesn't really wash your clothes.

But there's a laundromat across the street.

So I go there, and they have very high machines, so I have to ask other people to put in my clothes, stretch to take out my clothes.

There is also a laundromat higher up the street, but it's hard for me to walk up there.

It's hard for me to push my little carriage.

It's like a no win situation.

People who can afford to move, they moved down south, or they moved elsewhere in Stamford.

But poor people like myself, who doesn't have first month rent and first month security, I don't know what my credit is like, but I can't afford to move.

I really can't.

So I'm stuck here with this.

I just have to make the most of it.

You know, I feel lost.

And I can't cry.

I tried to cry, to get out whatever anger I have, the tears wouldn't come.

The tears just would not come.

- I retired just about two years ago, so that means my income is no longer to meet what they're asking for out here.

So I pray that someone would open their heart and get me a one bedroom so I can just live.

I mean, I really don't want to get emotional but, it is hard to think that this is how I'm going to end up for my years.

I mean, for God to be so good to me, to give me these years, and here I am with boxes and don't know where I'm going to go.

Well, what can I say?

But I still say God is good and I know a door will open for me and for others here.

- Things appear to be so messy because they are.

So we have a lot of bills that are providing incentives of one kind or another to try to spur development, which is all well and good, but until we start to remove some of those regulatory burdens, all the incentives in the world are not gonna result in the kind of outcomes I think we need to address the housing crisis that I think exists in the state.

- So here in Connecticut, we actually do have an important legislative tool to fight exclusionary zoning, which we refer to as Section 8-30g.

which we refer to as Section 8-30g.

- Throughout the 1980s, the suburban zoning commissions were approving large single-family homes on large one, two, three, four-acre lots.

But anytime someone proposed apartments or multifamily or low-income housing, it was getting denied.

And the legislature over several years began to be alarmed by this trend.

And that led to the first Blue Ribbon Commission on affordable housing appointed by Governor O'Neill.

- It says that in a town where fewer than 10% of the housing units are affordable, as defined in the statute, in order to deny a proposal to build a development that is at least 30% affordable, that a town has to demonstrate that its denial is necessary to preserve health and safety.

And if the town denies it and the developer appeals the denial to court, which is something that any developer can do anytime, but if it's an affordable housing development as defined in Section 8-30g, then the burden's on the town to prove that they're doing this to protect health and safety.

- By the mid-2010s, 2014, 2015, we started to see more settlements and approvals than we did denials that went to court.

And it is now, today in 2023, it's not unusual for us to see a headline where the commission said, "Well, I don't like this and I wouldn't normally approve it, "but the law says we have to approve it."

And that's what they tell, especially in the towns where zoning commissions are elected, they tell their constituents, "It's not something I would approve, "but the law's clear now "that we have to approve this," and they approve it.

- The driving impetus behind it is to say, "Look, if you're a town "that hasn't demonstrated a willingness "to accommodate affordable housing, "you're not one of these towns that has more than 10% "and has kind of demonstrated "that we don't need to be babysitting you, "if you're a town that needs babysitting, "then you better have a good reason "for not approving affordable housing, "and it's gotta be so good that it's health and safety.

"Because otherwise, "given our state's affordable housing shortage, "we actually think the affordable housing is more important "than the other things you're bringing up."

- We work with people every day who are experiencing housing insecurity, and there's so much we can do if we all play a role in this, if we all contribute in the sense of Fair Share.

We can get this done and we can be a stronger Connecticut.

So Fair Share is a policy proposal that would require the state of Connecticut to develop an assessment of the need for affordable housing, allocate it out to towns, and then have the towns undertake a process of planning and zoning to welcome their Fair Share allocation.

So any legislative battle about a really big concept is gonna take a few years, and we know that.

Usually, it's five to eight years before you see something big get passed.

So we're in year three, and we did see progress in the form of a requirement that the state of Connecticut create and assess some numbers for the need for affordable housing and then allocate them out to towns in a way that is fair.

Those were the first two steps of Fair Share.

Later steps included planning on the part of towns to accommodate their Fair Share and then an enforcement and incentive mechanism to make sure that the towns actually zoned for the number of units that they were allocated.

Those later pieces did not get passed, and obviously they're critical to having a meaningful system.

- For me, local zoning is the end of the conversation.

Those people are elected by the property owners in that town and they should be making those determinations.

I don't know that there is a requirement that we create a certain amount of affordable housing.

Maybe certain communities are just meant to end up the way their residents want them to be.

- One of the most astounding myths that sprung up around Fair Share this session was the notion that it took local control in zoning away from towns.

- The Fair Share Act, H.B.

6633, would triple down on all the worst characteristics of current statute and demoralize our towns and cities.

- The ability to zone is a state authority that is delegated to towns in accordance with certain rules, and those rules, embodied in Connecticut General Statute 8-2, our Zoning Enabling Act, say that all towns have to allow for multifamily housing, they have to zone for income diversity, and each town needs to be taking on a portion of the affordable housing need in its region.

Clearly, they're not doing it, and so clearly they need some assistance, and that would be provided in the form of Fair Share.

- This is a bipartisan issue of not doing much when it comes to housing.

What will change that?

I think tenant units organizing to really show some force behind necessary changes might change the conversation a little bit, when you put a face behind who's being impacted.

- Alright.

Good morning.

Today is a big day.

My name is Luke Melonakos-Harrison, I'm the Union Vice President of Connecticut Tenants Union.

Today, the Parkside Village II Tenant Union is announcing itself as here and on the scene.

Everyone here qualifies as elderly or disabled.

These tenants have been going through a lot, and they're here to just share their stories today, why they formed their tenant union, what their goals are, and what they're hoping to achieve.

Started back in 2021, just knocking on doors of tenants in New Haven, finding out what were the issues that people were dealing with.

- The definition of a tenant union that we use is actually very much taken from the labor union context.

So, a tenant union is about a group of folks coming together to push the landlord to do what they want the landlord to do, and also to push the landlord to stop doing what they don't want them to be doing, right?

We've seen that like when tenants get together and demand things like, you know, immediate fixes, trash removal, things like that, and that happens, okay, they get that win and then in a month, same problems.

And so being part of a union, I think that there's a couple of ways that the support is really helpful for what people wanna achieve long term.

One is that, one of the things we fight for is collectively bargained leases.

So actually getting a contract.

That's the piece of paper between the landlord and the tenant, that's the one marker of their relationship.

And actually negotiating around the terms of that relationship and the rent that is paid is a very different level of long-term stability and security, because what we fight for is multi-year leases, right?

My immediate thought back then was, okay, I'll just move.

And then I looked for apartments.

Turns out, because of the rental crisis in the city, I can't afford to live on my own anymore.

I ran the numbers, and it just doesn't look good, even with the raise that I know I'm gonna get in January.

I've lived in and around New Haven for my entire life.

I have a good union job where I make a median salary.

My neighbors are in similar situations.

Among us are teachers, social workers, hospital workers, retirees, some of us are single mothers or raising young children in these apartments.

We are representative of the types of people who are the backbone of the New Haven community.

My neighbors and I started this tenant union after we realized we couldn't solve our problems by moving anymore.

We have a moment, post COVID, where landlords are just jacking up the rent because they can.

More and more landlords are corporate entities or private equity backed, they're looking at renters as a paycheck, and this is the logical conclusion of treating housing as a commodity, as something to profit off of.

If the power of the landlord is the money that they have and the resources that they have, and often the connections that they have, our power is just the people.

And there's one landlord, usually one owner, and there's thousands of tenants, and so we think about what is the amount of tenants that belong to that rent from that landlord that actually need to come together in order to wage a real threat against that landlord.

And so we haven't done rent strikes yet, because they're very dangerous.

There's no defense for nonpayment, and we take that very seriously.

But, like labor unions, you know, the biggest weapon they have is the strike, and that's the horizon that we're building towards.

And I think that the rest of the country is wanting to be building towards the next few years, is what would it actually look like to withhold rent as a way of forcing the landlord to the table?

Basically demonstrating that at the end of the day, tenants pay the landlord's bills.

- Ocean!

- [All] Bargain!

- Ocean!

- [All] Bargain!

- Ocean!

- [All] Bargain!

- Every tenant meeting, especially at the beginning of an organizing effort, usually begins with what do you want?

And typically it starts with things like, you know, we want the roof to be fixed.

We want the appliances to be replaced.

We want maintenance to come in a timely manner.

We want the pests to be dealt with.

Just basic conditions of the housing, the environments that people are living in.

Inevitably, someone says it in the meeting, you know, we just want to be respected.

We just want to feel like human beings.

The number of times I've heard people say that, we just wanna feel like we're being treated as human beings.

We just want dignity, you know, we want a say.

- We're not asking for much.

We want a voice in Parkside's future.

We want transparency and a say in how the money is being managed.

We want housing security that lasts longer than a 12 month lease.

We wanna be recognized as a union and respected as human beings.

(gentle music) - I think the way you'll know if things are improving is if people are able to tell you they can afford rent.

When the tenant unions go away, then you'll know that people aren't being as severely impacted by this housing crisis.

Whether or not the policies are headed in the right direction, I don't see...

I mean, I think you see it in some communities, but by and large, I don't think it's had a wide scale impact quite yet.

- It's the only thing that we can get done politically is the opt-in.

It's giving the option, right?

There are a lot of communities that want to do something on this and are doing something on this issue, but there are far more that just kind of sit on their hands and ignore it.

You know, I think far too often we want to just defer.

The average person, the average taxpayer, the average voter wants to defer to their policy maker.

And what I would say is, You all have a responsibility for this problem too.

And until you choose to think beyond your comfort or to think beyond your sense of protecting what you have, we're going to continue to see this and you are being impacted in ways that you can't even appreciate.

- It's easy to send a check to Americares because you don't have to see it up close and personal.

But it's hard to smell the pain, feel the heartache, and absorb the depression that people go through because they don't have a place to be.

- I see conversations happening where people question whether there's segregation.

I see conversations questioning whether or not there is a housing crisis.

I think until there's wide scale agreement that there is a problem and that there's a dedicated decision to fix it, I don't see things changing.

Support provided by Connecituct Humanities and the Connecticut Fair Housing Center