Local Affordable Housing Groups Pioneer New Model

Photo courtesy of LCCHO LCCHO breaks ground in West Cornwall for one of 10 new affordable homes in the Northwest Corner

April 8, 2025

By Leila Javitch, Norfolk Now

t’s an exciting spring for affordable homes in Northwest Connecticut.

Litchfield County Center for Housing Opportunity (LCCHO) has fit together a program to build 10 new homes on scattered sites in five northwest towns via partnerships with each town’s volunteer affordable housing group.

In Norfolk, the Foundation for Norfolk Living will participate by building one new house. It will occupy a 1.5-acre lot on Old Colony Road below Haystack Woods, the much-anticipated affordable housing development of 10 homes. The available single house lot for the LCCHO project was donated by the Norfolk Land Company several years ago and is already connected to water and sewer.

As part of the new initiative, called the Litchfield County Affordable Homeownership Program, Salisbury will build four homes on sites already available to the Salisbury Housing Trust. There will be three new houses built in Cornwall, partnered by the Cornwall Housing Corporation. The Washington Community Housing Trust will build one home in Washington, and one house will be built in North Canaan by Habitat for Humanity of Northwest Connecticut.

The latter will be a “stick built” house, as Habitat for Humanity traditionally relies on volunteers for much of its construction. The nine other homes will use modular construction after site work and ground preparation are completed. Each will be a single- family home with three bedrooms and two full baths in a Cape design. LCCHO expects each home will take about nine months to complete from the start of construction.

This LCCHO project marks the very first occasion that housing from scattered sites and towns has been “bundled” together in one application and accepted as such by the Connecticut Department of Housing (DOH). The DOH has taken this on alongside Connecticut’s Capital for Change (C4C), a community development financial institution that assists developers in the creation of various types of affordable housing. C4C will provide program facilitation and construction loans for the project.

This innovative approach, if successful, could have a huge impact on the future construction of reasonably priced homes in the Northwest Corner. As a relatively small department, the DOH has determined that it is administratively and financially unfeasible to take on any project involving fewer than 10 houses. At the same time, small towns like Norfolk rarely have the property or resources

available to build more than one or two houses at a given time.

Further complicating the situation is the rapidly growing cost of building new houses—or even renovating older ones. Previously “affordable” housing has, in fact, become “middle-class” housing. Nurses, teachers, retail workers and firefighters, for example, cannot afford a home today in many Connecticut towns. “This threatens the very fabric of Northwest Connecticut,” explains LCCHO Director Joycelyn Ayres, “if no one can afford to live where he or she works.”

The median home sale prices in two neighboring towns is staggering: $1,115,000 in Cornwall and $912,000 in Salisbury. In Norfolk, the median home value in 2024 was estimated at $410,200, according to the Advance CT/CT Data Collaborative. That is a roughly 28 percent rise in three years, from $320,800 in 2021.

LCCHO figures suggest that Norfolk currently has 109 residents, or 15 percent of the population, spending 50 percent of their income on housing alone.

This innovative and multi-faceted program, bringing together state government, non-profit lending institutions and local volunteer groups, may provide a collaborative solution which will offer a new pathway to more stable housing for residents of small towns in Northwest Connecticut.

Editor’s note: The author is a member of the board of the Foundation for Norfolk Living.