Podcast: Anika Singh Lemar Confronts Connecticut’s Housing Crisis
In this episode of Inside Yale Law School4, Clinical Professor of Law Anika Singh Lemar talks to Dean Heather K. Gerken about the struggle to build more affordable housing in Connecticut. Lemar discusses the three clinics she leads at the Law School that work on housing issues and her ideas about making it easier to build more housing.
Anika Singh Lemar8 teaches clinics at Yale Law School that represent affordable housing developers, tenants, homeowners, small businesses, and community development organizations. Prior to joining the Law School faculty in 2013, she practiced real estate law at a Connecticut law firm. She writes about land use, zoning, and housing and has served on many nonprofit boards and government commissions.
Building affordable housing with architecture and business students (5:459)
Lemar co-teaches the interdisciplinary Housing Connecticut clinic10 that brings together students from the Law School, the Yale School of Architecture, and the Yale School of Management to create proposals for affordable housing. Their project recently broke ground for four homes in New Haven’s Newhallville neighborhood. She explains how this collaboration benefits her law students:
“It’s really important to them because that's how it's going to work in the real world, right? You don't solve a legal problem in a vacuum… So it helps to teach both a collaboration with the project partner as well as the other experts at the table. And it also teaches a lot of humility around what lawyers can do, what lawyers can't do, what lawyers might want to add to their wheelhouse and their skills and their training.”
Read more:
Class Assignment in Affordable Housing Now Under Construction11
New Haven Affordable Housing Development is First in a Partnership Between State and Yale12 (Connecticut Public Radio)
Housing Course Joining Law, Architecture and Business Wins Design Education Award13
“Nowhere to go” — Connecticut’s housing crisis (17:1314)
Housing advocates estimate that Connecticut needs an additional 150,000 housing units to meet the needs of low and moderate-income residents. Lemar outlines what this housing crisis means for tenants:
“The upshot is that in a city like New Haven, but really across the state, folks are paying too much for terrible quality housing. And when they are trying to move, which most of us do every six or seven years, whether it's because you need more space or less space or for a job or for a loved one or whatever, there's nowhere to go. The vacancy rates in Connecticut in the last few years have been lower than anywhere else in the country oftentimes.”
Read more:
Why do so many CT residents struggle to find affordable housing? One reason: exclusionary zoning15 (Connecticut Public Radio)
A better process for public input (21:1816)
Lemar discusses her research that examines the downside of public participation in planning and zoning processes. Her research was sparked by her experience representing a small housing authority that faced intense opposition to building an affordable housing complex in an affluent suburb.
“There is this assumption that public participation is an unmitigated good. The only thing that could ever be wrong with it is that you didn't do enough of it... But we've built a system that actually replicates a lot of the power differentials that we thought we were addressing. And we're providing a space where the most powerful people with the most time and money on their hands have voices that are extraordinarily loud, to the exclusion of the people we thought we were helping. So what would you do to make that better?”
Read more:
Overparticipation: Designing Effective Land Use Public Processes17 (Fordham Law Review)
Topics
01:1918 The work of the Law School’s housing19 and economic development clinics
05:459 Teaming up with the Yale School of Management and the Yale School of Architecture
12:5018 Supporting Connecticut’s 8-30G affordable housing law
17:13 14 The scale of Connecticut’s affordable housing crisis
21:1816 The downside of public participation in planning and zoning processes
26:1120 How to improve the public participation process
30:0421 Her students’ work on COVID relief funds22
32:1623 Gentrification and neighborhood revitalization
35:0823 Her motivation for running a housing clinic
