Lebanon, Connecticut is taking an unusual step for a small rural town: actively recruiting a developer to build affordable rental housing for its aging residents, who currently have almost nowhere in town to go when maintaining a single-family home becomes too costly or too much to manage.
The town is looking for a developer to build 16 affordable senior rental units at the Lebanon Senior Center on Imogene Lane, according to an RFP posted by the town on May 14. Siting the project on municipally-owned land next to an existing community facility cuts down on development costs and keeps the housing connected to services seniors already use.
Lebanon is a town of roughly 7,500 people in New London County, in the part of eastern Connecticut sometimes called the Quiet Corner. Its housing stock is overwhelmingly single-family homes, and like many small Connecticut towns, it has very little rental housing of any kind. That leaves older residents in a bind that has become familiar across rural New England: they own homes they can no longer easily afford or maintain, property taxes keep rising, and there is simply no local option to downsize and stay in the community where they've spent their lives.
Connecticut's 65-and-older population grew by more than 25 percent between 2010 and 2020, and rural towns like Lebanon have aged faster than urban centers as younger residents leave for larger job markets. The state has chronically underbuilt housing for decades, with zoning in small towns historically favoring large-lot single-family development and making multifamily projects difficult to approve. Lebanon's move to proactively pursue affordable senior housing puts it ahead of many peer towns, which have more often resisted such development, sometimes fighting proposed projects under the state's 8-30g affordable housing statute in court.
A developer selected through this process would likely assemble layered public financing, including federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits and HOME funds channeled through the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, alongside any municipal contribution from the land itself.
The RFP was released this month, and the timeline for selecting a developer and moving toward construction has not yet been made public.
