A new study by The Morning Consult has shown that the chief concern of younger urban voters across the country is the availability of affordable housing. The study was part of a series of polls aimed at gauging the priorities of this influential demographic, which is also a fast-growing segment of Fairfield County’s population.
The polling found that three out of every five urban voters wanted their local government to primarily focus on increasing affordable housing stock, making it a higher priority than curbing pollution among the more than 1,000 voters polled. When it came to existing housing stock, 78% of renters described the currently available housing as fair or poor, while 53% of the polled urban homeowners felt the same.
The ramifications of this trend have been noticed. Sabrina Church, Norwalk’s director of business development and tourism, has both professional and personal experience with the forces driving the anxiety of urban voters. In addition to the impacts of the current shortage of affordable housing on the city’s business community, she had to navigate a difficult housing market just to stay in her hometown.
“I don’t just think there’s a shortage of housing; the facts support it,” Church said. “There’s a shortage of housing and a shortage of different types of housing throughout Fairfield County and throughout almost every urban area in the country, especially in areas where there’s a possibility of high-paying jobs.”
According to Church, many young people cannot afford to live in Norwalk or other larger cities in Fairfield County and the surrounding area. Even if they can afford property, their choices are limited.
“There’s not a lot of wiggle room and stock available to move around, even within the same municipality for the population we currently have,” Church said. “That’s not even accounting for the folks who might want to move here who get a job locally or want to start a family. They’re all battling for the same small amount of housing stock.”
Church said that she and her fiancé, who works as a mechanic, gave up after a fruitless year of looking for a starter home in Norwalk that they hoped to finance with their combined incomes; she moved back with her parents. Later, the couple both earned promotions and were able to bring their budget up to $350,000. But even at that price, she stated, almost nothing worth having was for sale in Norwalk, where both wanted to stay and where Church worked as a city development planner.
They wound up taking a larger loan than they had initially wanted and moved into a 1,200-square-foot single-family home at the end of 2019. Church admitted this was incredibly lucky timing as the pandemic drove home values up over the next few months and they were able to refinance at a much better rate, but she said this isn’t the experience of most of her peers.
The impacts are felt in the real estate community as well. Ken D’Arinzo, the president of the Mid-Fairfield County Association of Realtors, said that he and his colleagues are seeing an unusual market shaped by two primary conditions.
“On one hand our inventory still remains very low,” D’Arinzo said, “and the other thing that affects are that interest rates are creeping up. The demand is increasing while the inventory is not.”
Exacerbating the issue is that sellers in the current market are somewhat disincentivized by the lack of homes for sale. D’Arinzo described situations where potential sellers looking to capitalize on the hot market wind up deciding against selling their house even at a good price since they’re unable to find an available home to move into which makes sense for them. As a result, sellers can wind up competing against their own potential buyers.
“So, now the market is crazy,” D’Arinzo said. “Sellers are being very calculated as far as putting their homes on the market. Prices are elevated and it’s currently standard that multiple offers are being submitted for homes and substantially above asking price. So, when you look at first, time home buyers or younger home buyers trying to fully enter the market compared to what they’re competing against it makes sense that there’s not much they can afford between elevated prices and substantial competition.”
Church and D’Arinzo both said that in Fairfield County some of the smaller and wealthier towns near the growing cities were out of compliance with state regulations that set minimum percentages of affordable housing stock.
“We have been in compliance pretty much since the inception of the state regulations,” Church said of Norwalk. “But places like Westport and Darien have not been. What’s happened is they’ve been allowed to explain why they haven’t met the affordability requirements. Things could be tightened up at the state level to better address the affordability piece of the issue.”
Other factors impacting the prices of housing and driving the anxiety of urban voters include supply chain issues driving up the price of construction materials, upsets in the labor market decreasing the availability of qualified contractors, and rising interest rates. Both Church and D’Arinzo believed that economic forces will eventually cause the current market to become more accessible but stressed that addressing these issues can accelerate the return to normal.
“Increasing our stock of affordable housing is critical to allow more people to become invested in our community and contribute to our local economy,” said State Senator Bob Duff, who represents Connecticut’s 25th District, including all of Norwalk and part of Darien, in an emailed statement to the Business Journals. “I have worked hard to increase the amount of affordable housing through state bonding and change overly restrictive red tape to build more housing. However, there is much more to be done. Connecticut’s economy cannot reach its full potential if we are not increasing our housing stock.
