Election 2023: Republican Candidates for First Selectman Debate Affordable Housing Strategies

New Canaan missed out on a chance to find an additional four years of relief from a state affordable housing law because the town wasn’t prepared, according to one Republican seeking party backing for the municipality’s highest elected office. 

The town’s moratorium under the widely discussed law known by its statute number, 8-30g, “lapsed” because “frankly, I don’t think we were prepared to file that moratorium, which I’m really concerned about,” Kimberly Norton said during a debate with fellow GOP first selectman candidates Dionna Carlson and incumbent Kevin Moynihan last week.

“It’s a very long process,” Norton continued at the July 18 debate, organized and moderated by the Republican Town Committee and held at Carriage Barn Arts Center. “It could have been ready to go. It could have been in the pipeline.”

Though the press was barred from attending the debate, a video of the first selectman debate was posted Thursday to YouTube. In addition to affordable housing, topics included dysfunction on the Board of Selectmen and improving cell service in New Canaan. The RTC hosted a series of debates for contested races among first selectman, Town Council and Board of Education candidates ahead of the July 25 Republican Caucus, where registered GOPers will vote to support select candidates with party backing.

To a question read out by RTC Chair and debate moderator Chris Wilson regarding how New Canaan should best address its affordable housing needs, Carlson said the town should work with a multi-municipality advocacy group to push for amendments to the 8-30 law in the state legislature. 

“We’re never going to get it overturned, but if we can modify it and make it more palatable to towns like ours—and there are a lot of towns like ours that are suffering under this legislation—I think we’ll have better outcomes,” Carlson said.

She continued: “I also think we need to look at developing properties locally that we control. When we control it, it’s 100% affordable and it’s permanently affordable. When a predatory developer develops an affordable housing project, it’s only affordable for 40 years and 30% of it is affordable, which creates a neverending hamster wheel of needing more affordable housing and we’ll never make it.”

Carlson appeared to refer to the town’s goals of creating enough new affordable housing to “chain together” four-year moratoria—such as the one secured in 2017 with the denser redevelopment of New Canaan Housing Authority-owned apartments Millport Avenue. Under 8-30g, in towns where less than 10% of all housing qualifies as “affordable,” under the state’s definition, developers who propose housing projects where at least 30% of units will be rented at affordable rates can get around local Planning & Zoning Commission decisions through an appeal process. 

There currently are three such appeals underway in state Superior Court in Hartford, for projects planned at Weed and Elm Streets (120 units), Main Street (20 units) and Hill Street (93 units). 

Carlson said that New Canaan should “really go after developing locally and identifying projects” in order to create more units. 

“And we need to work with our legislators better to make them understand why we deserve the moratorium,” she said. “And that’s really working on having a longer-term relationship. You can’t show up when you’re upset about something and fight. You have to establish relationships and nurture them.”
Moynihan said that the town was “defeated by COVID in terms of our moratorium.”

“COVID delayed getting funding for Canaan Parish and COVID delayed getting gas into the building,” he said. “We couldn’t get a CO [Certificate of Occupancy] until October of 2021.”

In fact, the financing issues that Moynihan cited had emerged in April 2019, nearly a full year prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic here—as the chair of the New Canaan Housing Authority himself has noted. At Moynihan’s direction, the town applied for its moratorium last summer, and he himself said the town had been “led to believe” the application would be approved—an assertion that the state Department of Housing flatly denied. After the state formally denied the application, the town filed a lawsuit objecting to the decision. The state in May then issued a “declaratory ruling” bolstering its denial, and the town last month sued again.

During the debate, Moynihan downplayed the importance of the affordable housing issue, saying “the reality is, we really don’t need a moratorium in New Canaan.”

“We qualify for a moratorium right now if we want to go get it,” Moynihan said, despite the state’s October denial of New Canaan’s application. “We can’t work by the rules of the state when they change the rules midstream. What the state did to us when we applied for a moratorium is said, ‘Oh, you didn’t realize you have to build precisely 60 units in a four-year period. And if you build more, you’re not going to get any credit.’ That’s a crazy policy. Our lawyers believe it’s wrong. I believe it’s wrong. They basically want to take 40 brand-new units to say you can’t get any credit for those. Twenty million dollars of investment in 40 units trashed. So we can’t play by the rules of the state. It doesn’t play square and fair.”

Moynihan also downplayed the “threat” of the three 8-30g applications that have already come into the town and now are undergoing the appeal process in Hartford.

Referring to local developer Arnold Karp, who is behind the three 8-30g proposals, Moynihan said, “With respect to the Karp developments, I told Arnold publicly when the first project was announced, ‘This is a dumb strategy.’ And then when he brings three at the same time, it’s a really dumb strategy. He doesn’t want to build what he’s proposing and he won’t build what he’s proposing. The reality is we’re kind of lucky we have a guy like Arnold Karp rather than a predatory developer from outside of town bringing this issue to us. This is our first time at the rodeo. Darien had developers, they paid off, over several times. So we’re in good shape. This is not the earth shaking issue. We will never get Hartford to change their policy. That’s a fool’s errand.”

Karp himself has said he had approached Moynihan and the town several times with more modest proposals at the three properties in question, but those were dismissed out of hand. For example, Karp said the senior housing development proposed for Weed and Elm Streets in 2018 would have included about 80 units and in a much smaller area than the 102-unit development now planned for the lot because senior residents “do not need larger spaces and the parking need is much less.” Similarly, Karp said that when Vine Cottage went out for bid, he had proposed a modest townhouse development to be called “Colonial Corner,” which would have left in place both Vine Cottage and the former Red Cross building, which he already owns, while doing a land swap with the town so that the latter could obtain more parking near Town Hall. And Karp said he had proposed selling the town a parcel he owns on Hill Street, below Brushy Ridge, for its own affordable housing development. Instead of having at least 30% of units set aside for affordable housing, as private developers are required to have under the 8-30g law, the town could have created 100% affordable housing there, Karp said, achieving a higher number of units in a smaller development. But the town officials he spoke to, including members of the Housing Authority and Town Council, “didn’t think we should do anything,” Karp said. 

“For all these years we did little to nothing,” Karp told NewCanaanite.com.

Carlson pushed back on Moynihan’s characterization of working with state legislators on amending the 8-30g law.

“I never think developing relationships is a ‘fool’s errand,’ ” she said. “I think you never know what you can move the needle on until you try. And I’ve found that when people feel connected, you often can change behavior. So I actually disagree with the ‘fool’s errand’ comment. And I also think we need to be responsive to the needs of our staff who felt overworked, and we missed a moratorium because we missed a deadline. And so we’re in the situation we’re in because we missed a second moratorium.”

Norton said that as a member of the Town Council, she has “been on the forefront of forming the Affordable Housing Committee.”

“I fought for more residents to be on that Committee—five residents as opposed to three—so the residents have a larger voice,” Norton said. “And one of the reasons I’m doing that is because I think we have so much talent in our community, I think we’re going to make better decisions that way. So, I will be, clearly, the front runner for this. I felt very comfortable in Hartford. I got a student data privacy bill passed in Hartford, spent a lot of time there, and I think I want to be able to have ‘Team New Canaan,’ our five representatives, three Democrats and two Republicans in my office forming Team New Canaan, communicating with the residents and making sure that everyone’s on the same page of how we want to move forward. We’ve got to get our moratorium back and we’ve got to do it as quickly as possible.”

She added during a rebuttal period that “I do think it’s going to be very hard to change 830-g, but we already have relationships set up in Hartford.”

“That’s why we elect local representatives and local senators,” she said. “So I don’t think we need to recreate the wheel.”

Nodding toward Moyinhan, she continued, “So I have full confidence that I don’t think those five representatives have been in your office, have they, all together forming Team New Canaan?”

To Carlson’s strategy of working with an umbrella advocacy group composed of multiple towns, Norton said, “I have the utmost respect for everything that they’ve done, but we’re one out of 169 towns.”

“So I’m here to protect New Canaan,” Norton continued. “I want to do everything I can for the town. And even though our [housing unit equivalency] points, as you said, have not been counted the way we would like them to, that doesn’t mean that we stop moving forward. That doesn’t mean that we stop developing a plan. That doesn’t mean we stop communicating with residents. So I see a huge void. I would like to get all the representatives in our office and see what we can do, but not just for affordable housing, for all other issues that we face.”