Northwest Connecticut Affordable Housing and Conservation Strategy

Purpose Statement

Healthy communities need both affordable housing and conserved land.

Cross sector and regional collaboration among town governments, housing organizations, and conservation organizations is vital to achieving our affordable housing and conservation goals.

Introduction

The Northwest Connecticut Affordable Housing and Conservation Collaboration was initiated in January 2024, with the goal of equipping participating communities with the strategies, tools, and relationships to work together to support both local affordable housing efforts and conservation efforts. This work was funded by a community engagement grant awarded to the Litchfield Hills Greenprint Collaborative by the Foundation for Community Health and Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation and was initially focused on the service area of these foundations. Greenprint partnered with the Litchfield County Center for Housing Opportunity to co-facilitate this collaboration.

Housing plays a central role in Litchfield County’s economic vitality and quality of life. We all benefit when our Main Street businesses, banks, schools, farms, town halls, daycare and healthcare providers- all our employers- have the workforce they need to survive and thrive. They can’t do this without the housing options that are affordable and available to their workforce. We also all benefit when our seniors have downsizing options, young families can afford their first home, and our volunteer fire and ambulance services have the volunteers they need. We know how to create these affordable housing options in Litchfield County and have many local success stories we can point to. We can create housing opportunities that preserve and enhance the small-town quality of life so many of us enjoy.

Northwest Connecticut towns have developed municipal housing plans to better understand the housing needs of current and future residents and workers and have developed strategies to address them. Local, volunteer-led housing nonprofits are successfully building and caring for affordable homes and apartments befitting their communities and need more support to be able to help their towns meet affordable housing goals.

Conservation also plays a central role in Litchfield County’s economic vitality and quality of life. The area’s beauty, clean air and water, wildlife, locally-grown foods, and outdoor recreation are compelling reasons to live, work, and visit here. Working lands and recreation based tourism strengthen our local economies. Government and nonprofit organizations have worked to conserve these environmental benefits, yet the need for additional protected land persists.

Worldwide, the climate crisis is disrupting natural systems resulting in an uncertain future for our environment. Ambitious goals call for the permanent conservation of as much as 50% of the planet to meet these challenges, but here in Northwest Connecticut pursuing numerical goals alone is not enough: Scientists consider the forests of the eastern United States stretching from the Hudson Valley toCanada to be the most intact temperate deciduous and mixed forest region on Earth, critical for wildlife habitat and migration. Without strategic focus, the connectivity of this massive corridor will be broken - its forests eroded and disconnected.

The Follow the Forest Initiative responds to this risk. A nationally significant strategy to connect and protect forests and promote the safe passage of wildlife, the initiative is seated within the Nature Conservancy’s climate connectivity modeling and is augmented by community science and collaborative conservation action.

How Did We Get Here?

Greenprint partnered with LCCHO to invite representatives from town Boards of Selectmen, Planning and Zoning Commissions, conservation organizations, and housing organizations from the eight participating towns. Representatives attended 6 meetings from February to September 2024.

Meeting participants discussed current initiatives and goals for their towns and ways they could support each other moving forward. The group then drafted a purpose statement and strategies as further described below and created a mapping tool to help evaluate parcels for suitability for conservation and affordable housing development. The mapping tool identifies development considerations such as water and sewer capability, zoning, slopes and wetland soils, aquifer protection areas, critical habitats, as well as where wildlife linkages between core forests are located.

What’s Next?

The participants plan for their organizations to endorse the purpose statement and strategies set forth herein, communicate their work together and their successes with a unified voice, pursue specific activities within their towns identified during breakout sessions, and explore future project opportunities together. If you are considering bringing this to your board, commission, or organization for their endorsement, you can download a sample Resolution of Support.

Our participants agree:

1. Our communities need conserved land that supports clean water, fish and wildlife habitat, climate resilience, food production, and recreation access.

2. Our communities also need dedicated affordable housing options that support people in every stage of life, including those who work and volunteer in our towns.

3. We need to collaborate locally and regionally to work towards a healthy balance of both affordable housing and conserved land.

Housing and Conservation Goals

Participants

Participating towns were the eight towns in the Foundation for Community Health’s and Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation’s Connecticut service area that have an active housing non-profit and/or land trust. We had over 60 individual participants, representing 40 organizations or town commissions. We want to thank everyone who participated for their time, their ideas, and their enthusiasm for this collaboration.

Representatives from the following boards, commissions, and organizations participated in this collaboration project. Following the publication of this Collaboration Strategy, these representatives plan to bring the Strategy to their boards to ask them to sign on to support the Strategy moving forward. As each new board, commission, or organization signs onto this Collaboration we will update this list on our project website. We’d welcome groups from outside of these eight original towns to sign on as well.

Online Mapping Tool

A key deliverable for this collaboration is an online mapping tool that can be used to identify parcels in each of our 8 participating towns that may be well-suited for housing development or a collaborative housing and conservation project. The map was produced by Stacy Deming of the Housatonic Valley Association (GIS Manager).