Recently, Vice President Kamala Harris announced her plan to lower housing costs by building 3 million new housing units in the next four years.
Her pledge is just one of many policy proposals aimed at addressing the current housing shortage and bringing down prices for renters and homeowners, in part by clearing away outdated laws and regulations that stand in the way of expanding the supply of affordable housing.
While we appreciate any effort to end the country’s housing shortage, we offer another reason to address this issue: affordable housing can save lives.
In Connecticut, 71% of extremely low-income renter households are severely financially burdened. Unfortunately, several proposed housing reforms fell through when Connecticut’s legislative session ended in May. These reforms, including incentives for transit-oriented communities that encourage the construction of affordable housing near bus and train stations, the Housing Growth Fund, sewer infrastructure expansions, and protections from no-fault eviction, sought to lay groundwork to expand housing and curtail rising costs in a state recently ranked the worst in the U.S. for renters.
Where we live determines where we access housing, schools, jobs, and food. It also determines the quality of our air, water, and outdoor spaces. All these shape our health, which is why segregation drives many of the racialized and socioeconomic health disparities we see today.
Recently, we decided to test whether we could reduce segregation and narrow these disparities by expanding housing opportunities in places with clean air, low noise, and green spaces that tend to restrict new housing the most. In this study, we imagined a hypothetical Connecticut, where every town with very little affordable housing had built new units until at least 10% of its housing was affordable. This 10% target came from a provision in Section 8-30g, a state law that has often come under fire from people who oppose affordable housing.
Although the law has been in place since 1989, there has been little research on its effects to date, and less still on its potential effects if leveraged more fully. In short, 8-30g disincentivizes towns below the 10% target from denying affordable housing proposals on frivolous grounds. Like the law in Massachusetts, Chapter 40B, Section 8-30g has been necessary but insufficient in spurring housing production across the state. We saw an opportunity, then, to project how fulfilling this benchmark might reduce deaths through changes in environmental exposures, like air pollution, noise, and greenspace.
Not only did we find that creating these opportunities for relocation into new affordable housing would reduce segregation, but we also found that it could save 246 lives in one year alone – just from environmental changes. Realistically, we would also expect greater housing stability, better food environments, and other changes that would save additional lives and prevent illness.
So, what does this mean for 2025? It means that the time to desegregate Connecticut communities is now. Luckily, there are promising proposals that could get us to a healthier, more affordable, and more equitable future.
There are brilliant minds throughout the state proposing important solutions to consider and study. As recommended by the recent OPM study, exclusionary zoning is an important place to start. Originating from efforts to exclude minoritized and low-wealth residents from areas of high wealth, these are dated local ordinances that block high-density housing, either explicitly or through arbitrary building height and lot size restrictions.
States around the country are considering important housing changes. For example, California’s HOME Act, Washington’s House Bill 1110, and Maine’s LD 2003 have eliminated or restricted single-family-only zoning statewide. Further, New Jersey has adopted a Fair Share model, which allocates housing goals to towns according to local needs, capacities, and contributions, and has already shown success.
Moreover, transit-oriented development proposals such as Work Live Ride, which passed in the Connecticut House of Representatives but did not receive a final vote in the state Senate, would incentivize towns to build housing near transit. This could mean less sprawl, lower emissions, and healthier, more affordable communities. Finally, and importantly, there are proposals nationwide for building permanently affordable and community-controlled social housing outside the for-profit market. These offer a new vision for housing – as a human right rather than a commodity.
There is vast ingenuity in this state to address housing and environmental and health disparities. Let us work together to make progress on these important issues.
Daniel Carrión, PhD, MPH, is an assistant professor of epidemiology (Environmental Health) at
the Yale School of Public Health. He is an environmental health scientist focused on the
intersection of climate, energy, and health inequity. His goal is to understand the relationship
between structural forms of inequality with exposure and health disparities to identify and
support interventions.
Saira Prasanth received her master’s in Public Health (Chronic Disease Epidemiology) in 2024
from the Yale School of Public Health where she was a fellow at the Yale Center on Climate
Change and Health. She is a PhD student in population health sciences at Harvard
University.
