By: Ginny Monk, CT Mirror
Good morning!
Last week, the Partnership for Strong Communities hosted its annual housing conference. This conference is typically two days long and covers a pretty wide range of topics on homeownership, rental housing and preserving housing affordability, among other subjects.
This year, a panel on Fair Rent Commissions stuck out to me as interesting. It’s been a couple of years since the state legislature passed a law expanding the number of towns required to have fair rent commissions, and we are seeing the effects of that law play out.
Fair rent commissions are local bodies, typically with appointed members who can make legally binding decisions about whether rent increases are fair. There’s a number of factors they have to consider including rents in other areas, the sanitary conditions of the house, number of bathrooms and bedrooms, services offered and whether repairs are made.
In 2022, state lawmakers passed a bill that required towns with 25,000 or more residents to adopt ordinances creating fair rent commissions by July 1, 2023. Before that law passed, 25 towns had commissions, and the law required 27 new towns to create commissions.
Although not all towns had commissions in place by that deadline, they’ve slowly been establishing the groups and taking cases.
One of the most interesting pieces of information from the panel last week was that the coalition of fair rent commissions is gaining traction in Connecticut. A group of commission members and staff, which started discussing how to form a coalition earlier this year, has since formed one and is now working to figure out the best ways to improve fair rent commissions across the state.