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“Affordable Housing.”
They are the two words in the English language that strike fear among elected officials in Lower Fairfield County.
They are rivaled only by the words “low income.”
Housing advocates are attempting to hold Greenwich to an agreement it made two decades ago to add affordable housing in exchange for land it received from the Cos Cob power plant. The friars of Field Point Road have made it clear that they intend to challenge this obligation. A meeting with the black robes from Hartford is on tap.
Why do I have this uneasy feeling that Greenwich is about to embark on its annual rite of public humiliation? It’s our version of Groundhog Day, except that it’s an annual cycle instead of a 24-hour cycle.
This year’s headline? “Greenwich says no to housing for teachers, nurses and fire fighters.”
That would follow previously ignominious headlines as, “Greenwich says no to Stamford Beachgoers” and “Greenwich says no to Port Chester ferry riders.”
Okay. Okay. I exaggerate. I know we opened our ferries. But after “they” sat on our beaches and occupied the picnic table on Little Captain’s Island that has been “our” table for generations, we’ve decided to make it just a little more difficult for “them” to do that.
The great tragedy of Greenwich is that when you have actually lived here, you come to appreciate that, despite its wealth, it’s a layered and multi-faceted community – a far departure from its public caricature. It is, in fact, the fastest growing municipality in all of Fairfield County in terms of ethnicity and race. It has a proud tradition of philanthropy that is the envy of a nation. It has the most vibrant international community in the entire New York region. It has a working class heritage. And it voted for Barack Obama.
It is not New Canaan. It is certainly not Darien, whose per capita household income is 50 percent higher than that of Greenwich.
Rye, Scarsdale, Bronxville, Wilton, Weston, Westport, Bedford, Short Hills, N.J. all fit the Greenwich stereotype better than Greenwich.
I remember one weekend a few years ago, when my son played soccer at Binney Park, I heard these languages spoken: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Russian (maybe Ukrainian, I couldn’t tell for sure), Japanese, Chinese and English. All in a couple of hours.
Yet we insist on enabling the caricature – that Greenwich is synonymous with Back Country. It is not.
In fact, Greenwich has a higher percentage of affordable housing than many neighboring towns in Fairfield County. The new town planning document puts that number at 5 percent of the houses here. There are about 3,000 units of various subsidized housing, including Section 8 housing and housing for the elderly. That’s more than the entire housing stock of the towns of Sherman, Kent, Cornwall and Washington. I’d love to know what their percentage of affordable housing is.
The state’s requirement that 10 percent of the housing be “affordable” may be unattainable in my lifetime, but it hasn’t been neglected either. Plus, there are mechanisms for increasing that percentage without spending a lot of money. Private developers looking for work may suddenly find affordable housing doable in this economy. There are Section 8 vouchers available to subsidize the rental of private units.
The mantra among some elected official that “if our own children can’t afford to live here, why should I spend money to build homes for others” simply isn’t representative of many views here. The tone coming from Field Point Road is one of defensiveness and defiance. It’s the same tone that has earned us the reputation of being xenophobic.
When my son attended Eastern Middle School, he was greeted every morning by the principal who also was a neighbor whom we ran into now and then at Porricelli’s. His music teacher lived a mile away on Sound Beach Avenue. Increasingly, that is a rare phenomenon.
I want the teachers who teach our children and the nurses who care for our infirmed to be part of our community so that they are sensitized to our needs at the most basic level.
Our penchant for appearing self-absorbed and uncaring belies the true nature and the true character of this community.
Our public officials should take care to understand that they are merely temporary stewards of the brand that is Greenwich, Connecticut, and that their representation of our town as a walled enclave is shared by only a loud minority of the residents – a declining minority – and that a growing number of us are comfortable with the true essence that is Greenwich, which is both generous and diverse.
