via The Hour

By Kalleen Rose Ozanic | Published on September 6, 2024

Laura Lopez lives with her fiance, John, and 2-year-old daughter in one bedroom in Norwalk because they can’t find anywhere else to live. They haven’t been able to for five years.

They live with John’s family in his childhood home in South Norwalk, where they both work, but they need their own space, she said. They share the living room, kitchen and bathrooms with family, including John’s grandparents, parents and sister. They rent the room for $500 a month, which Lopez said is fairly comfortable — but not having their own space isn’t.

“It’s a little tight,” Lopez said.

Lopez and her fiance want to move somewhere in Fairfield County before their daughter, Giulianna, starts school in a couple of years. But it’s “so discouraging,” Lopez said, to bump into the same barriers in their housing search time and time again.

Move-in costs, low housing inventory, high rents for small apartments, long or completely closed waitlists for affordable housing, and exhaustion from a years-long search make finding a home “impossible,” Lopez said.

Lopez’s story is all too common in Fairfield County and throughout the state.

Experts say that ideally, a maximum of 30 percent of monthly income should go to housing costs. With an annual household income of about $34,700, which breaks down to $2,890 monthly, Lopez and her fiance shouldn’t spend more than $867 on rent and utilities each month.

A $500 monthly rent for two adults and a toddler is safely under that threshold. But even a fair market rent two-bedroom unit in Connecticut — which would give one bedroom to Lopez and her fiance and another for Giulianna — costs $1,796 a month, the National Low Income Housing Coalition reports.

Finding affordable housing is difficult, experts say. The federal government and some Connecticut regulations define it as housing capped at 30 percent of a household’s income.

If Lopez and her fiance were able to land a fair market rental at $1,796 a month, they’d be paying over double what experts said they should, hypothetically spending 62 percent of their income on rent alone. That doesn’t account for the long waitlists and low inventory of below-market and at-market rentals across the state.

Living in a renter’s shoes

Renting in the Stamford-Norwalk metropolitan area requires the highest hourly wage in the state to afford a two-bedroom unit: $50.54, according to the 2024 Out of Reach Report from the coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization that advocates for affordable housing for everyone.

The report describes what wage earners need across Connecticut to afford fair market rentals ranging from studios to four-bedroom units. The metropolitan areas are defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The National Low Income Housing Coalition compiles these regions and housing cost data to compile its Out of Reach Report each year.

The housing wage is what it costs to rent a fair market two-bedroom unit in any given area — though experts and renters agree that even this number can be conservative because affordable rentals are not as prevalent as higher-cost units.

Danbury, another major metro area in Fairfield County, with a $42.71 housing wage, ranks second highest in the state. And in Fairfield County’s other major area, Bridgeport, the housing wage is $37.83, ranking the area third in the state.

With Lopez working part time at Open Doors in Norwalk as its Community Closet program coordinator and her fiance working full-time in the city, their annual household income breaks down to a $16.69 hourly wage. Earning about $34 less than what the coalition reports they need to make to live where they want, Lopez said she feels hopeless.

“It's going to be impossible to reach,” she said.

She and her fiance would both have to work full time and more to reach that housing wage — and even then they would have to make concessions, Lopez said.

“We prioritize having dinner together as a family because obviously, throughout the day, we're not with (Giulianna),” Lopez said. “We’ll have dinner as a family. We’ll try to take her to the backyard, we’ll play with her. Those are the moments that really matter to us."

But after spending years on affordable housing waitlists, searching and finding out-of-reach rents, Lopez said she feels she’ll only find a place if she’s lucky.

“I’ve learned to leave it to God,” Lopez said.

Lisa Joseph, who is also trying to find housing in Fairfield County, works as an income support specialist at the Economic Opportunity Hub at Open Doors — a nonprofit organization in Norwalk that offers social services and emergency housing.

Joseph works full time and makes about $48,000 annually — or about $23 hourly. Living alone in a place that is close to her Norwalk job is Joseph’s priority, but she said her hourly wage is $11 less than what the coalition reports she needs for just a studio apartment.

She said driving to work from Stratford during rush hour, can vary from an hour to up to 90 minutes.

“The commute is killing me,” Joseph said. “It just does something to your mental.”

She said she lives with a friend after recently fleeing domestic violence. Retaining her independence is a crucial part of her recovery, Joseph said. But that feels out of reach, she said, after spending months on affordable housing waitlists and seeing discouragingly-high rents.

Joseph said she her best bet at finding housing would be to find a unit that is designated as affordable. She’s 121st on one waiting list and 31st on another she said.

And looking at other units is a wash, she said. According to Apartments.com rental data across Bridgeport, Danbury, Norwalk and Stamford last month, the average rent for a one-bedroom unit was $2,206. But based on the 30 percent housing cost standard, Joseph should be spending, at most, $1,200 monthly on her housing costs.

It’s discouraging to earn so far below the housing wage, Joseph said, but her earnings at Open Doors are much higher than when she was working three jobs concurrently.

“When you're working three jobs, are you really living?” she said.

The two women said don’t live their lives the way they want to.

Lopez said she and her fiance look for “free-99” activities, such as walking around the SoNo Collection mall with their daughter.

“We haven't had a date night in so long,” Lopez said.

When Joseph gets home after work, she said she’s beat. She said she'll take a nap and wake up late, squandering any time to catch up on her other needs because she’s so exhausted.

Prohibitive rental climate

Michele Conderino, Open Doors’ executive director, said she wishes her nonprofit could pay her employees more. But the salary levels show the challenges presented in Connecticut, where renters face a 32 percent income-to-rent ratio; a critically low vacancy rate; and inflated rental costs, Hearst Connecticut Media Group reporting shows.

Elsewhere in the country, Joseph’s $48,000 salary is $3,000 higher than the $45,056 median income for nonfamily households like herself, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Conderino said Open Doors’ employees would have livable wages anywhere else in the country, but not in Connecticut, with its inflated rental costs.

The rental climate is prohibitive across the state, according to Conderino and Adam Bovilsky, executive director at the Norwalk Housing Authority.

“We have a lot of luxury apartment complexes coming into town and they are charging a much higher rent than many of the sort of traditional mom-and-pop landlords are used to charging,” Bovilsky said. “They see what's going on, they see the market going up.”

A search on Apartments.com on Aug. 30 showed only 41 two-bedroom or more apartments in all of Fairfield County for rent for less than $1,796 — the fair market rent the coalition determined for Connecticut.

Conversely, 1,678 two-bedroom units were available at or above that rent and 3,095 apartments of any size at or above $1,796. Bovilksy said there are more apartments available at higher costs than there are affordable housing options — which are in very high demand and further drive up costs of that limited supply.