CT Mirror | By: Ginny Monk
In the midst of a worsening housing crisis, Connecticut lawmakers will look to pass legislation around zoning, homelessness and eviction reform during the 2025 legislative session, which kicked off Wednesday. It’s a reprise of agendas they’ve considered in past sessions — with a couple of new ideas.
As in past years, housing advocates face a complicated political reality in which Democratic support for significant measures to increase the housing supply is divided, while Republicans staunchly oppose many proposals.
But the membership of both parties broadly say they’re looking for ways to make Connecticut more affordable. House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, who has championed housing legislation, said he thinks housing — a primary driver of the cost of living — is the obvious answer.
“There are things we can control better than other issues, and one of them is housing,” Rojas said. “If we’re really serious about addressing the affordability needs of people in Connecticut, there are some things that are cheaper to do and more feasible to do around housing.”
Connecticut lacks about 98,000 units of housing that are affordable and available to its lowest-income renters. Homelessness has increased over the past few years, and thousands of people are paying more than a third of their income to housing costs.
Gov. Ned Lamont agreed that there’s an urgency to housing legislation. In his annual State of the State address Wednesday, the governor issued a directive to the General Assembly’s two committees tasked with considering solutions to the crisis: Housing and Planning and Development.
Speed up the permitting process,” Lamont said. “Get those shovels in the ground.”
Rojas said he’s “intrigued” to hear more ideas from the governor on ways to speed up the process of building housing. Asked whether he thinks there will be movement on housing bills this session, Rojas responded: “We’ll make movement.”