EAST HAVEN

The time has come for the Planning and Zoning Commission (PZC) to craft new regulations as a springboard for meeting the strategies and goals established in the Affordable Housing Plan (AHP), said Zoning Enforcement Officer Joe Budrow.

The East Haven Town Council adopted the AHP in March with the mission “to provide for a variety of housing choices in East Haven for people and families of all income, ages, and characteristics.” To make good on that guiding principle, the PZC is looking specifically at Section 6.5 of the plan, entitled “Encourage Housing Development In Areas Supported By The Community,” as a starting point to establish new zoning regulations that would pave the way for more diverse and affordable housing options.

One of the steps the PZC is looking to make is revising language in Section 37 of East Haven Zoning Regulations that concerns affordable housing. This includes crafting language that can help to “reduce barriers to housing production” and then “look for opportunities to create flexible zoning regulations in areas where the municipality wants to encourage housing production.” This would make Section 37 aligned with the AHP and the town’s Plan of Conservation and Development, said Budrow.

This will enable a key strategy to be introduced that would support greater housing options and meet Connecticut State Statutes 8-30g—that East Haven must have 10% of its housing stock deemed affordable.

“Hopefully, by the end of the year, we’ll have a draft regulation for what many towns call, ‘inclusionary zoning [IZ],’” said Budrow.

According to the AHP, “IZ is an approach where the private sector is encouraged or required to include below-market housing units in new developments. The IZ policy effectively leverages private market investment to create new affordable units with very little [if any] public subsidy.”

Budrow said adding IZ to Section 37 would make it easier for developers to approach the PZC with plans for new affordable housing units.

“When the housing plan was completed, we didn’t have any regulations in place for inclusionary zoning, so we needed to come up with a plan for when multifamily proposals came our way or multiple tenant proposals came our way,” he said.

To ensure a portion of units in a development are affordable, the PZC is considering establishing “set-aside language” that would require 20% of units in a multifamily development, for example, to be affordable. The “set-aside language” would also be “sprinkled throughout” zoning regulations in general to encourage affordable housing in other housing districts where there is no IZ, according to Budrow.

The term “below-market” should also not be a determinant for the quality of units either, Budrow added.

“We definitely want them established and built similar to the market rate ones. We don’t want cheaper materials...[We want] things evenly distributed throughout the building, same quality of construction—we’ll put that in the regulations, too,” he said.

The “set-aside language” would be applied broadly to town zoning regulations with a greater purpose beyond requiring more options in affordable housing and meeting the threshold established by 8-30g. Revision would help make East Haven a “housing-friendly” town, while providing an affordable place to live.

“It’s more than just we want to get to this goal—we want to kind of have a concept of it’s a good place to start a family,” said Budrow.

Still determined to offer greater housing options, the PZC is also looking at crafting new language on accessory dwelling units (ADU), a kind of housing whose legality in East Haven has been asked about to the PZC.

“The concept of accessory dwelling units, where these are dwelling units that are separate from the principal dwelling unit...there’s been no conceptual regulation for this type of land use, so we would tell people, ‘Not allowed,’” said Budrow. “This gives up guidelines to a very popular land use, and we’re just putting all the criteria together that are going to be as friendly to the residents as possible.”

Because of East Haven’s narrowed geography and tightly packed spaces, Budrow said the PZC will look at how other towns of similar sizes have established official language on the zoning of ADU in densely packed neighborhoods.

Budrow said the PZC would look to have a petition for a text amendment governing ADU by sometime in November, with a public hearing on the proposed amendment in January next year.

“The commission is finally excited to be crafting an accessory dwelling unit regulation to be at a public hearing stage early next year,” he said.

Whether ADU or IS-governed multifamily apartment buildings, the PZC is hoping to receive new applications for development in the five identified potential areas in town. These include along Foxon Road, Strong Street, and the east and west sides of Main Street. The plan identifies these areas as locations that have “several large, big box and retail plaza locations” or “single-story retail plazas” that could be redeveloped to include multifamily mixed-use development over time and are proximate to the CT Transit Bus Line. This would meet a Section 6.5 goal of having new housing “along transit” or “in commercial areas.”