As the state, like the rest of the nation, faces an affordable housing crisis, several proposals were floated over the past 24 hours to help Connecticut residents find housing and keep them there.
Gov. Ned Lamont’s budget adjustment includes two separate housing initiatives. The first would allocate an additional $2 million to the Judicial Department for the Connecticut Right to Counsel (CT-RTC) program.
The CT-RTC program is designed to provide free legal representation for tenants that qualify who are facing eviction or the loss of a housing subsidy. According to a report prepared for the Connecticut Bar Foundation, the program helped 71% of tenets who used the program avoid unwanted evictions in 2022, and saved the state nearly $6 million in emergency shelter services and child welfare costs.
The other is a proposal to allocate $1.5 million to the Department of Housing to hire a contractor to develop an application that would serve as a single point of access for federal, state and local housing aid.
The application could help streamline the process for families looking for housing vouchers, which is plagued by exceptionally long waiting periods. According to Steve DiLella, individual and family support programs director with Connecticut Department of Housing, the waitlist for housing vouchers has opened just twice in the last 17 years.
Meanwhile, the state legislature is also taking steps to address so-called evictions without cause. On Thursday, the Housing Committee voted on a series of concepts, including a proposal that would expand the state’s “for cause” eviction protections to all renters.
Under current state law, landlords are permitted to evict tenants at the end of a lease for “no cause,” or no reason other than the lease has terminated. In the case of tenants who are renting month-to-month, they can be evicted without cause with as little as three days’ notice.
The expansion of “just cause” protections is modeled on a law the state passed in 1980. The law protects elderly and physically disabled tenants from “no cause” evictions. These protections apply to all rental properties except for owner-occupied properties and properties with less than five units.
Proponents of expanding the just cause law say that tenants who live in unsafe and neglected properties are hampered in their negotiations with landlords because they may be arbitrarily evicted at the end of their lease as a punitive measure.
“The lack of basic protections against arbitrary evictions jeopardizes good faith negotiation between tenants and landlords — not to mention basic fairness — since landlords can take away a renter’s shelter at any moment, for any reason,” Hannah Srajer and Luke Melonakos-Harrison, president and vice president of the Connecticut Tenants Union, wrote in an op-ed earlier this year.
Supporters of the law also state that keeping tenants in their current housing provides stability for families and the neighborhoods where those tenants reside.
The Connecticut Apartment Association has a different take.
Jessica Doll, executive director of the Connecticut Apartment Association, said that “A lease is a contract and when a contract ends, both parties have the opportunity to choose to renew. As recent data shows, end-of-lease/lapse-of-time non-renewals are rare. They are also a very important tool used as a last resort when action must be taken to preserve safe, stable living communities.”
Sen. Rob Sampson, R-Southington, pointed out that such a law may cause more housing affordability problems that it solves.
“These [leasing] agreements are private contracts for both parties. We’re talking about free citizens on both sides of that contract, and they have the right to negotiate those terms. That’s how our private contracts work. That’s how America works,” he said Thursday during the committee meeting. “You wonder why we have an affordable housing problem, it’s because landlords are afraid of the state government imposing more and more regulations to make it more difficult to operate in this state.”
Doll said according to data from the Connecticut Judicial Branch “lapse-of-time non-renewals are a small percentage of total evictions, used only 11 percent of the time in Bridgeport, 8.2 percent in Hartford and 17 percent in New Haven. On behalf of our member housing providers who represent over 67,000 apartment homes in Connecticut, we look forward to participating in this important policymaking discussion.”
According to data from the Eviction Lab, a think tank run out of Princeton University, Connecticut had 20,622 eviction filings in 2023, a rate that is 105% of the pre-pandemic average in the state. The state issued an eviction moratorium in April 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but those protections expired in June 2021. Evictions occurred most frequently in Hartford country, followed by New Haven and Fairfield counties.
