Mandate affordable housing in CT and some people may leave. Let them.

At least someone was taking it seriously.

The backstory is that I had been talking with someone whose company was looking to build a few hundred apartments in a Connecticut suburb. Opponents — and if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know what’s coming next — didn’t like it.

One prominent opponent said he might be OK if they built a different number of apartments, and he had a specific number in mind. He said he’d support 88 of them.

I heard this number secondhand, and my ears perked up. “He said ‘88’?” I asked. That number specifically?

“Yes,” was the response, and no one could figure out why. It wasn’t half or a third of the total they’d sought, it didn’t fit the proposed layout and didn’t correspond to anything else on the site. No one knew why this number was brought up at all.

As it happens, I did know what that number means, at least in some cases. It’s popular in white supremacist circles, for reasons you’re free to look up yourself if so inclined. I mentioned this during my conversation with the developer’s office.

A few weeks later, I was asked if I would like to speak to the DOJ.

Then as now, there had been a lot of talk around the state about opposition to multifamily housing being about more than stormwater runoff or whatever excuse was convenient that day. If projects were being killed because of explicit racism, that’s something the federal government would have an interest in investigating.

The federal government didn’t need me, because if I knew the provenance of the number in question, certainly they did, too. But it was yet another sign that something bigger was happening behind the scenes.

All this was brought back by a recent story concerning testimony before a state task force looking at the problems with building affordable housing. A developer talked about encountering “systemic racism” from residents opposed to a housing plan, and recounted some of the long list of ways a project can be slowed down. Ultimately, many applicants give up because they don’t have endless resources to keep fighting.

Systemic racism usually refers to something that happens below the surface, something so ingrained that it could go unnoticed unless you were looking for it. But often opposition to housing is overt. It might come in the form of code words or euphemisms (references to crime and “the cities” are common), but it’s the same dynamic that led to white flight decades ago and the creation of the suburbs as a haven. So little has changed in that regard, even if people are a little more polite about it than they used to be.

In Darien on Tuesday, Maisa Tisdale, president of the Mary and Eliza Freeman Center for History and Community, spoke at a housing forum about the South End of Bridgeport. The Freeman Houses in that neighborhood are Connecticut’s oldest surviving African American homes, dating to a pre-Civil War settlement of free people of color known as Little Liberia.

As a neighborhood of Black and Native American people, the area was over the years turned into an industrial hub, with power plants, including a trash-burning plant, polluting the neighborhood. It was emblematic of what happens to Black neighborhoods all over, Tisdale said, where the infrastructure that makes other, richer people’s lives possible is crammed in alongside people who have less political power.

This is how America, including Connecticut, going back hundreds of years, has handled neighborhoods where Black people live. There’s nothing natural about it; it’s the result of policy decisions made by people in power. After all these years, not enough has changed.

We have to understand, then, what the opposition to integrated housing is about. It’s not a matter of convincing people that more housing is in their best interests, or thinking about their kids and their chances of affording a home, or even about filling all those open jobs Connecticut has to offer. All those are real issues, but they’re not driving the people who keep killing or shrinking housing developments. Straight-up racism is a bigger factor than any other.

To overcome such obstacles, it’s just as important to keep in mind what won’t work. Incentives are never going to be enough. We can’t ask nicely. Hoping people will do the right thing is a fruitless path.

We, as a state and a nation, need to change laws. It’s not that changing laws will eliminate people’s prejudices, but it is the only way to make meaningful progress. This country didn’t reduce discrimination in public accommodations by asking people to be more accepting; it made such actions illegal. We didn’t achieve whatever fleeting and temporary progress was seen in school integration by offering incentives. We changed laws. We could change them again.

Better, fairer housing will only be achieved the same way. It’s understandable why people talk about coaxing people over to their way of thinking, and stating their case in such a way that the logic will be inarguable. History shows it won’t work. Mandates are the way forward. Mandate fair housing. Tell towns they must allow housing for all income levels, with penalties for noncompliance.

People will complain. They always have. Some might leave. Let them. The state will be better off anyway. Mandate the change we need.

Hugh Bailey is editorial page editor of the Connecticut Post and New Haven Register. He can be reached at hbailey@hearstmediact.com.