Affordable Housing Plan Scorecards: Windham County
In 2017 the Connecticut legislature passed General Statutes Sec. 8-30j, requiring every municipality to adopt an affordable housing plan by June 1, 2022. This legislation responded to the need to create more affordable homes in Connecticut and the desire for municipalities to play a lead role in planning for affordability locally. While developing their plans, communities have the opportunity to come together to discuss how and where to create more affordable homes at the local level.
The Center for Housing Equity and Opportunity Eastern Connecticut (CHEO) partnered with Desegregate CT and Regional Plan Association (RPA) to develop scorecards assessing the plans in Windham County with respect to the process undertaken to develop the plan, and the plan’s ability to effectively assess housing need and promote action. This work builds on the affordable housing plan scorecards developed for New London County in October 2023, and the affordable housing plan scorecards developed for Fairfield County by the Fairfield County Center for Housing Opportunity in September 2022.
Scores
Click on the town icons below to access their full scorecard. For a full breakdown of how points were allocated, please refer to this Appendix. Scores were developed by comparing affordable housing plans to the recommendations in the Planning for Affordability in Connecticut guidebook published by the Connecticut Department of Housing in 2020.
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▶ Ashford: 2.5 out of 5
▶ Brooklyn: 2 out of 5
▶ Canterbury: 2 out of 5
▶ Chaplain: 2 out of 5
▶ Eastford: 1 out of 5
▶ Hampton: 2 out of 5
▶ Killingly: 2 out of 5
▶ Plainfield: 2.5 out of 5
▶ Pomfret: 2.5 out of 5
▶ Putnam: 2.5 out of 5
▶ Scotland: 2 out of 5
▶ Thompson: 2.5 out of 5
▶ Windham: 2 out of 5
▶ Woodstock: 2 out of 5
Summary
Windham County experiences the effects of Connecticut’s severe lack of affordable housing. Within the county, nearly 20% of homerenters and 30% of homeowners with a mortgage are cost-burdened, spending 30% or more of their income on housing-related costs. The Connecticut legislature passed General Statutes Sec. 8-30j in 2017, requiring every municipality to adopt an affordable housing plan by June 1, 2022. As of June 2024, 14 out of 16 towns in Windham County have adopted plans. These plans represent an opportunity for towns and cities to demonstrate their commitment to meaningful local action that will create more affordable homes in Windham County communities.
According to the Planning for Affordability in Connecticut guidebook published by the Connecticut Department of Housing in 2020, town plans should outline tangible steps for increasing access to housing for people of all income levels, backgrounds, and stages of life in all communities.
Through the planning process, towns are expected to bring together a diverse group of community members, including renters, homeowners, and members of the local workforce who contribute to the vitality of communities whether or not they can afford to live locally. This group should identify shared values, determine local and regional housing needs and barriers to access, and develop clear goals and implementation strategies to expand housing opportunities using zoning, funding, and an array of other tools. Towns are also expected to acknowledge the inequities that currently exist in how decisions around affordable housing are made, and seek to address those inequities with more inclusive planning. Each municipal affordable housing plan should provide clarity on what type of housing is needed, how much is needed, and where it should be located.
Drawing on regional and national best practice recommendations outlined in Planning for Affordability, the following scorecards assess how well Windham County towns have delivered on these goals.
Methodology
CHEO, Desegregate CT, and RPA scored the affordable housing plans by comparing them to the recommendations in the Connecticut Department of Housing’s Planning for Affordability in Connecticut guidebook.
These scorecards are based on a weighted scoring system that corresponds with priorities outlined in the guidebook. Plans were given a score of 0-5 overall, and categories for scoring were broken down as follows:
Submission of plan: 0-10%
Planning process: 0-15%
Needs assessment: 0-30%
Recommended actions: 0-45%
A plan that earns a score of 5 has followed the guidebook nearly to a tee. This is an actionable plan developed by a diverse group of stakeholders reflecting meaningful outreach that acknowledges local housing history and current needs and proposes concrete actions to advance affordability, each with a discrete time frame and responsible party. A plan that earns a score of 1 has few, if any, of these components.
Results
In Windham County, 14 out of 15 municipalities have approved a local affordable housing plan and submitted it to the Connecticut Office of Policy and Management (OPM). The 14 municipalities include Ashford, Brooklyn, Canterbury, Chaplin, Eastford, Hampton, Killingly, Plainfield, Pomfret, Putnam, Scotland, Thompson, Windham and Woodstock. As of June, 2024, Sterling did not submit a plan.
These 14 plans were analyzed using the scoring system outlined above. The average community achieved a score of 2 out of 5. Thompson achieved the highest score of 2.5 (with 53.5 out of 100 points). Eastford received the lowest score of 1 (with 24 out of 100 points).
Because scores reflect three separate areas of achievement - Planning Process, Housing Needs Assessment, and Action & Implementation - even though some plans received low scores overall, encouraging actions and trends appear in most local plans. For example:
Almost every town included a thorough housing supply assessment that details existing affordable housing stock, an assessment of housing type, and an assessment of housing tenure (renters vs. homeowners, etc.).
Windham partnered with the Windham Housing Trust Fund initiative to support investment in affordable housing, and requiring a fee if developments don’t meet the requirements.
Thompson proposed retrofitting large single-family homes into middle housing or multi-family homes in historic districts, such as the Thompson Common Village District.
Hampton proposed establishing a standing Housing Committee, with a designated Housing Officer, in order to create a clear person and group for residents to go to when they have a question about housing and affordability.
At the same time, most Windham County communities have more work to do to bring invested and inclusive leadership to the table to shape decisions and recommendations regarding affordable housing. Almost none of the plans provided information on the diversity of the affordable housing committee or group that led the planning process (by age, race, income, housing tenure, etc.). Only one town explicitly acknowledged the link between institutional racism and access to housing in their plan, while almost none of the towns brought a regional analysis to their plans.
It is important to acknowledge that communities embarked on this process from different starting points with differing capacity and access to resources. Further, scorecards may not reflect all the actions a community is taking to expand housing opportunities if those actions are not explicitly included in the plan.
Additionally, there are many barriers towns face to building more equitable communities, even if they want to. In the rural town of Canterbury’s plan, they specifically mention high costs of transportation as a roadblock, stating: “another challenge with increasing the affordability of housing in a rural town is that despite even successful efforts in creating additional affordable units, whether they be as statutorily defined or generally attainable, they would still exist in a community at distant locations from employment and other necessary destinations, therefore requiring high transportation costs undoing much of the benefit of affordability gained from the additional units.”
Ultimately the success of these local affordable housing plans will lie in their implementation. A community’s plan may include a terrific list of proposed actions, none of which move out of the idea stage. Or a community’s plan may include just three concrete actions to create more homes, but all are implemented in full within the next five years. CHEO will continue to assist communities as they implement and adjust these plans, and will track progress on implementation throughout the region.
What’s Next?
Reviewing the town plans and highlighting their creativity and strengths, as well as their shortcomings or omissions, is the first step. How can we move from plan to implementation, and from words to action to create more affordable homes in all communities? What can these plans achieve, and what can they not achieve? How can they be supported and supplemented by actions at other levels of government?
Now that there is consensus around the real and pressing need for more affordable homes across Connecticut, we must all work to translate these plans into action so that our communities and our region become more prosperous, equitable, and sustainable for the next generation. CHEO stands with Windham County towns to help turn plans into actions.
Appendix
Detailed information about the allocation of points in each category and total plan scores is available in this Appendix.
