Salisbury adopts housing plan to tackle its ‘existential crisis’

SALISBURY — The Salisbury Affordable Housing Plan for 2023 was unanimously adopted by the Salisbury Town Board of Selectmen during a special meeting Thursday, Oct. 12.

The Plan, assembled by the Salisbury Affordable Housing Committee, provides a roadmap for the construction of 100 new affordable housing units in the next ten years. 

Currently, there are over 100 qualifying households on the waitlist for Sarum Village, one of the existing affordable developments in town (currently, 57 housing units in town qualify as “affordable”). About 162 people in Salisbury live in poverty, according to CTData.

Five years ago, the board adopted the 2018 Salisbury Affordable Housing Plan, which mapped out the construction of 75 new units by 2028. Since its adoption by the town, three new affordable units have been completed.

Meanwhile, the median sales price of a single family home in the last year was $912,500—(the average price over the same period was $1,282,236)—or “affordable” to those with an annual income of roughly $231,280. Salisbury’s median income is $72,658.

An “Existential Crisis”

In the last 20 years, Salisbury has seen an exodus of young adults and young families. The median age—now 52 in Salisbury—is about 10% higher than the figure in Litchfield County.

The median income—not adjusted for inflation—fell 13.6% between 2010 and 2019 (the second largest drop in Connecticut in that period, after Mansfield), according to census data.

Affordable housing in Salisbury is now “an existential crisis” for the town, said Jim Dresser, who served as a Town Selectman for 12 years, and is now a member of both the Affordable Housing Commission and the Affordable Housing Committee.

The problem is not new—it has simply grown starker and more urgent. Back in the year 2000, in a series of meetings sponsored by the Salisbury Association, a forum of residents determined that the lack of affordable housing was the most pressing problem facing the town. They cited shortages of workers and professionals, particularly teachers and healthcare workers, seniors losing longtime homes, diminishing numbers of emergency services volunteers and healthcare workers, and an economically stagnant “downtown.”

At the time, “there was already difficulty getting staff at Sharon Hospital. Difficulty finding plumbers and home health care workers and so on,” said Dresser. “It just wasn’t in everybody’s face like it is today. Today, you go to LeBonne’s at 5:00 in the afternoon, and it’s ‘closed early lack of staff.’”

A well-documented and increasingly perilous shortage of teachers, healthcare workers, non-medical caretakers, emergency service volunteers—not to mention cashiers and restaurant workers, plumbers and contractors, butchers and stockists—belies the less obvious decline in qualified municipal workers, journalists and writers, non-profit professionals, small-business owners and entrepreneurs, and managers at local banks and other businesses.

“There is a large segment of this community that is incrementally being forced out of our town,” said Michael Klemens, chairman of the Salisbury Planning & Zoning Commission. “Ultimately, a community that lacks a diversity of income levels, a diversity of people, of different socioeconomic levels, different abilities, different interests, is a community that becomes unhealthy and unsustainable.”

Unless the trend is reversed, said Klemens, Salisbury cannot sustain “the community as we have known it.”

The Problems

In order to support a diversity of people, said Klemens, we need a diversity of housing. That is what Salisbury does not have.

“We housing folks refer to a housing ladder, which I’m sure we’ve all been on—you start on the bottom rungs, maybe a studio apartment in college, then a one bedroom,” said Dresser. “Eventually you might get to the point where you can buy a small starter house—that’s the housing ladder. If the bottom rungs are missing, you can’t get on it.”

Of Salisbury’s primary residences, 81% are detached, single-family homes, more than a third of which have four or more bedrooms. (Two-bedroom units constitute 18% of the town’s housing stock).

In part, it’s a zoning problem, said Jocelyn Ayr, the Director of the Litchfield Center for Housing Opportunity.

“I work with all of the 16 communities in Litchfield County on affordable housing plans,” said Ayr. In every case, she said, the only kind of home you can build “by right […] is just a single-family home on three acres, basically.” Anything else requires a special permit from the town, the notification of the abutters, public hearings, at minimum, she said.

Salisbury’s housing crisis is further deepened by the town’s unique peculiarities.

In Salisbury, just 36.4% of housing units are owner-occupied, compared to 64.5% in Litchfield County. (Nearly half of the housing units in Salisbury are “second homes” or short-term rentals.)

The topography of the area is also particularly poorly suited to building.

“There’s a land shortage,” said Klemens. “It may seem more that’s ironical given how much land there is, but there’s very little buildable land” that isn’t being farmed, he said. Most of the land in the township is wetlands, floodplains, or steep, rocky slopes and mountains.

The Plan

If implemented in its entirety, the 2023 Plan would create 100 new affordable housing units in the next ten years, bringing the total number of housing units defined as “affordable” up to 157 by 2033. 

In their discussion prior to adopting the 2023 Plan, each of the three Town Selectmen emphasized that the Plan does not have to be effected in its entirety. 

“It’s a plan, which is the key word,” said Selectman Don Mayland. “As with all plans, some things may have to be change.”

“This is a guideline,” agreed Selectman Christian Williams. “It will assist us in achieving our goals. It’s not set in stone. It has to go through the other committees and boards of our town for approval on anything that gets done.”

The Board of Selectmen also took up other issues that the Plan touched on. First Selectman Curtis Rand raised the question of “homestead” legislation, which would offer some kind of tax relief to longtime Salisbury homeowners for whom the property tax burden has become too high to afford.

“[Property tax] is hollowing out of the middle class, it really is,” said Williams. “It’s making it unattainable to be in the middle class and living in this town. There’s something we have to do about this. […] Affordable housing is part of it but it’s not all of it.”

“Well this is a problem, a serious problem,” said Mayland. “And it warrants some serious thought to it.”

To read more about the housing plan, see Salisbury presents 2023 affordable housing plan.