Chris Powell: What housing emergency?
In Danbury: Clockwise from top left: Main Street Historic District, The Summit at Danbury, Tarrywile Mansion, Praxair Headquarters, Danbury Municipal Airport, Danbury Fair Mall, David Wooster Monument, Western Connecticut State University, and the Danbury Railway Museum
— Wikipedia
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Maybe the recession that has begun will loosen up Connecticut's housing market, but it will take a while even as the poor get poorer. The housing shortage is already making life desperate for many of the poor. But state government doesn't yet consider it an emergency, not even in the face of what seems about to happen in Danbury.
For the two years of the virus epidemic a former hotel building in Danbury has been operated as a shelter for the homeless by a social-service organization based in Stamford, Pacific House. The organization got state financing to purchase the building for use as a shelter but Danbury's zoning board has refused to approve it. The shelter has stayed in operation only because of one of Gov. Ned Lamont's emergency orders arising from the epidemic, but those orders expire Dec. 28.
The former hotel is adjacent to Interstate 84 and few residences are nearby, so the shelter is no more of a nuisance than the hotel was. While it is far from medical and commercial facilities and thus not the most convenient location for the homeless, Pacific House can bring services to them or help them get where they need to go as they work to gain self-sufficiency.
If state government really cared about the poor and troubled, it would pass a law exempting shelters from zoning regulations just as it has exempted group homes for the mentally handicapped.
Danbury lacks any facility that can accommodate all the people now being housed at the former hotel. Most may be out on the street at the end of the month just as the dead of winter sets in. Surely state government can put aside less essential matters until it solves the emergency housing problem.
Crooked guards
Connecticut's Correction Department lately worsened the state's housing problem. It was inadvertent but predictable.
Since prison guards work in tightly confined spaces and were at more risk of contracting COVID 19, the department used federal epidemic emergency money to let them rent hotel rooms so they might avoid infecting their families.
But, the Connecticut Mirror reports, state auditors found that the program was badly abused. Correction Department employees, the Mirror says, "used the program to book hotel rooms during a wedding, to celebrate New Year's Eve, and to live full-time in the hotels with their families. ... Others booked rooms in multiple hotels on the same days, and at least one correction officer used the program while he was on military leave." Some employees used the program to live in hotels for five months or more.
There were rules again this kind of thing but since this was an emergency, no one was hired to enforce them. Some employees who abused the program suffered short suspensions but it seems that no one was fired or prosecuted.
Of course, much federal emergency money has been defrauded throughout the country, just as it was defrauded by the corrupt city government in West Haven, where more than a million dollars was stolen or misdirected by a City Council aide who was also a state representative.
The lesson seems to be that any emergency's first order of business should be to hire extra auditors.
Another murder despite protective order
Another Connecticut woman who had a protective order was murdered the other week, apparently by the former boyfriend she got the order against. Julie Minogue of Milford was battered to death with an ax after her ex had harassed her with hundreds of text messages. An arrest warrant application for the harasser had been pending, left incomplete, for weeks.
The Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence says there have been 12 intimate partner murders in the state so far this year.
The only way to stop them is to require police, prosecutors, and courts to give priority to domestic threats and violence and to impose heavy penalties upon conviction, even for first offenses. Here too state government is always doing many less important things.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)