Chris Powell: The hyper-hypocrisies of exclusionary zoning

Minuteman Statue in the exclusive Compo Beach section of the rich Fairfield County, Conn., town of Westport

— Photo by WestportWiki

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Nearly everybody wants some peace and quiet at home, so naturally enough residential real estate is often about exclusivity. "Park-like setting" may be the most appealing part of advertisements for housing, followed closely by location in a successful school district.

Since only the rich can guarantee such housing for themselves with their own funds, buying not only the housing but also the park to go with it, municipalities have used zoning regulations to separate residential from industrial and commercial areas. There is nothing wrong with that. But as Connecticut knows only too well, municipalities also use zoning for exclusion -- to keep people out generally and the poor particularly, since the poor cost government more than they pay in taxes and are disproportionately disruptive.

While exclusive zoning goes too far, Connecticut long has failed to curtail its excesses, and so the suburbs are always producing hypocritical controversies about what should be only ordinary housing development. Such controversies recently broke out in Westport and Vernon.

In Westport a Superior Court judge has overturned the Planning and Zoning Commission's rejection of an 81-unit apartment complex that neighbors say will diminish safety in the neighborhood. The neighbors insist that they are not against less-expensive housing or more people from minority groups in town; they just don't want such housing near them, what with the extra traffic and all.

The argument is similar in Vernon, where neighbors petitioned against a plan to build 56 apartments on a street with both single-family and multifamily housing. Besides raising traffic and safety concerns, the neighbors contended that there is already too much multifamily housing in the area.

Too much multifamily housing for whom? There's not too much for people looking for housing in a state whose housing costs are already high and long have been pricing people out of many towns. Indeed, while homeowners celebrate rising property values, renters and people seeking to set up their own households don't, any more than homeowners celebrate rising prices for food and medical insurance. For housing is a necessity of life just as those other things are.

The more that is claimed by necessities from personal incomes, the less discretionary income people have and the more they are just surviving, not living.

The traffic argument against housing is always weak if not ridiculous, since of course there can be no new housing without traffic, and the housing in which the opponents of new housing live increased traffic itself.

People raise traffic concerns about housing only when they are already comfortably settled. Nobody thinks of himself as constituting too much traffic and nobody declines to move into an area because he will be increasing traffic for others.

Until the radical environmentalists take over and impose brutal population controls like China's, population and economic growth will continue to go hand in hand in the United States and require more housing. Connecticut can't achieve economic class and racial integration without it.

More housing in the suburbs isn't the only way of achieving economic class and racial integration. That also might be achieved by acknowledging the failure of Connecticut's welfare and urban policies to elevate the poor and members of racial minorities and improve the cities in which most of them live. Then the middle class might want to return.

But the interests that are invested in the failure of welfare and urban policy and the failure of the cities themselves remain too influential in state politics. If the cities were not perpetually poor -- essentially poverty factories operated by government and controlling the tens of thousands of votes cast by both the poor and the legions ministering to them at government expense -- Connecticut's majority political party would lose its decisive pluralities in state elections.

Government has much less patronage to bestow when the private sector is prosperous and people are well educated, skilled, and self-sufficient. As a political matter, that can't be allowed.

So for the time being Connecticut might do well just to reflect that it’s a good thing the Indians never had zoning. Otherwise there'd never have been any integration and there would be no one to lose money at their casinos.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.