A menu of affordable housing options

SALISBURY — Dwight Merriam, a lawyer with Robinson and Cole, LLP, who has an extensive background in affordable housing, suggested several types of housing solutions that might be part of an overall housing solution at the May 5 meeting of the Affordable Housing Advisory Committee. The options discussed were:

• Elderly cottage housing opportunities: Small structures that can be placed on a family’s lot for use by an aging senior family member, and then removed again when there is no longer a need.

• Multiple units, single-family appearance: This is a solution already in place in several houses in Salisbury, where a large home is reconstructed into several smaller units while still maintaining the “lookâ€� of a single-family home. The committee has expressed an interest in this type of conversion, seeing it as a way to use existing structures, rather than new development,  to create affordable housing.

• Live-work units: This solution calls for a “store-front� or “studio� for the first floor with a family residence on the second story. This approach has been discussed for the center of the two villages that make up the town of Salisbury.

• Single-room occupancy hotels: This solution calls for the redesign of an area hotel into a series of single-room living units. Some of these units might be at market price and some subsidized by the town to remain affordable.

In his presentation, Merriam noted that Connecticut is the eighth “oldest� state in the country; Salisbury itself has a median age of 49.

And in Salisbury, one quarter of all households has minor children; one third of all households are single people and 8 percent have incomes below the poverty line.

Merriam said that while housing costs in Connecticut increased by 70 percent over the past seven years, wages increased only 34 percent.