May 29, 2013
Rep. Jason Rojas on Wednesday praised the enactment of a bill he introduced that would establish a task force to review legislative solutions for eliminating impediments to fair housing choice.
Rep. Rojas, House chairman of the legislature’s Planning and Development Committee, where the legislation was introduced, led the House of Representatives recently in voting overwhelmingly to approve the bill. The Senate passed it unanimously and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed it into law Wednesday.
“Understanding the impediments that exist to developing affordable housing and providing access to protected classes of people as well as families with children is critical to the health and well-being of people, communities and our state,” Rojas said.
“We are required by the Fair Housing Act to undertake the analysis to impediments and rather than have all the work that has gone into the analysis go unrecognized or unvalued. I proposed the creation of a task force to be made of experts on housing issues to study and analyze the findings over the rest of the year with the goal of developing legislative recommendations to be considered by the General Assembly during the 2014 legislative session,” Rojas said.
“My personal interest in the analysis is primarily focused on the hyper-concentration of poverty that exists in Connecticut and the significant costs we incur because of it,” Rojas said. “The cost of that concentrated poverty manifests itself in the form of social services that have to be provided as well as the enormous costs, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, we are incurring through Sheff v O'Neill, which is more about housing segregation than simply school segregation.”
“The task force will allow us to bring together all stakeholders to have a thoughtful discussion on the impediments to fair housing,” Rojas said.
The task force must submit a report on its findings and recommendations to the joint standing committees of the General Assembly before Feb. 6, 2014.
Rojas serves the 9th Assembly District, which consists of portions of East Hartford and Manchester.