AFFORDABLE HOUSING DRAFT - Salisbury, CT

with incomes below $60,000. As a more pointed example, a teacher with a bachelor’s degree startingat Salisbury Central School in 2009 earns a salary of $37,780. Only one house in this period wasavailable at a price he or she could afford. Using the 30 percent of income guideline, he or she wouldhave been able to afford a $945 per month rental, if any were available.The age of homes in Salisbury adds to the affordable housing dilemma. According to the 2000Census, almost half of the community’s residences were built before 1950, compared to a statewideaverage of about 30 percent. Increasingly, our housing stock of older,Over threesingle-family houses does not match the needs of our population,years, only oneespecially our older residents. According to Dwight Merriam, Certifiedhouse was soldPlanner and land-use attorney with the legal firm of Robinson & Cole,in Salisbury thatthese homes are “too expensive to buy, to maintain, and to heat.” Manywas affordableolder residents say that they would like to sell their homes and move intoto a new teachersmaller condominiums or apartments if any were available, leaving theat Salisburyhouses for occupancy by young families or for division into duplexes orCentral School.apartments.We all have anecdotal evidence of young adults and young families moving out of Salisbury but noevidence of significant numbers moving in. While the agecohort information produced by decennial censuses does not Connecticut as a wholeprovide reliable data for individual towns, we do know that is losing 25-34 year-oldsConnecticut as a whole is losing 25-34 year-olds at a faster rate at a faster rate than anythan any other state. 6 The most recent projections (March other state2007), which include school enrollment data, projectSalisbury’s young population (aged 0-19) to decline from 892 in 2000 to 739 in 2030, while the“working population” of 20-to-64 year olds will decline from 2,162 to 1,799. Conversely, Salisbury’spopulation of those 65 and older is projected to almost triple from 751 to 1,829 by 2030. 7Salisbury thus stands out demographically in several ways relevant to the issue of affordablehousing, even among the similar towns of Northwest Connecticut. An analysis of the 1990 and 2000Censuses done by Dan McGuinness, Executive Director of the Northwest Connecticut Council ofGovernments, which includes the six Region One towns plus Roxbury, Warren, and Washington,revealed that:6 For further details, see www.homeconnecticut.org.7 This data is from the Connecticut State Data Center, the State’s official liaison to the U.S. Census, located atthe University of Connecticut.15