You Thought the Affordable Units Went to Teachers and Firefighters. One Went to the Developer Himself

In 2017, a developer came to Fairfield with a plan for sixteen condominiums on Westway Road in Southport. Two of the sixteen would be affordable — deed-restricted for forty years, sold only to a buyer earning no more than 80 percent of the area median income. That promise is why the project was approved. Those two units are counted, to this day, toward Fairfield's tally under the state's affordable housing law.

The Affordability Plan that made the promise runs about thirty pages with six schedules. It sets the income formula. It sets the maximum sale price. It requires the units to be advertised twice in a newspaper and noticed to the Housing Authority. It requires an annual written compliance report to be filed with the Town Plan and Zoning Commission every year by January 31 — and it supplies the certification form to file it on.

Fairfield did not fail to write the rule.

Who checks

The Plan names an "Administrator" to verify that buyers qualify. The Administrator is the developer.

So the developer sold the first affordable unit to himself, in December 2018, for $205,000. He sold the second, in September 2021, to the son of his business partner, for $386,467. A resident's letter now in the Board's file notes that market-rate units in the same development were selling for between $1,045,000 and $1,275,000.

Then the Administrator filed the annual report on both sales.

What the report said

According to the Town Attorney's brief to the Zoning Board of Appeals, the compliance report dated January 22, 2019 identified 461 Westway Road as an 80-percent-AMI unit, listed the head of household as the developer, listed the household count as one — and reported total household income of $86,000.

The income limit for that unit was $52,528.

The report dated January 11, 2022 reported the second buyer's household income as $63,431. That limit was $56,336.

The Town's own lawyers put it plainly: the compliance report "showed noncompliance on its face."

It was filed on the Town's form, on time, with the Commission that approved the project. And nothing happened. The first enforcement order in the file is dated May 13, 2024 — more than five years later. The orders were then paused, in the Town's words, "so that the parties could engage in settlement discussions." Notices of violation were finally issued on January 29, 2026, seven years after the first report.

In January 2025, the developer filed amended compliance reports for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 — all at once.

The other requirement

An affordable unit here has to be the owner's principal residence. The Plan says so in one sentence, and it is one of the grounds the Town cited.

That one is contested, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. A neighbor across the street filed a signed letter with the Board stating that the developer has lived there since 2018 and that he travels for work like anyone else. The Town's own brief concedes the Board could decide residency in his favor and the income problem would still stand on its own.

What came out at the hearing is that a Board member cited published reports suggesting he likely owns property in Rutland, Vermont, and that he acknowledged his wife has a house in Florida. The Town's notice of violation, for its part, lists three mailing addresses for him — Southport, Trumbull, and Estero, Florida.

Make of that what you will. The Board will.

What is and isn't decided

Both men have appealed. Their attorney — who is the second buyer's father, and who also financed his son's purchase with a $300,000 mortgage — argues the Town has misread its own income rules. The Zoning Board of Appeals heard three hours of it on August 6 and held the hearing open; a second session is expected within thirty days. Nothing here is adjudicated, and it shouldn't be treated as though it were.

The developer's defense, at the hearing, was that the laws are poorly written. On one narrow point he is right: nothing in the Plan requires anyone to re-check a buyer's income after the sale. "You can qualify for an affordable unit one day," he said, "and win the lottery the next day and keep your house."

But the income that matters under this Plan is income at the time of purchase. And the document reporting it was in a Town file the whole time.

The part that isn't about Westway

At least six other people applied for those two units. The developer's explanation was that they "were not first in line."

That is a real rule — the Plan does rank applicants first-come, first-served. It ranks qualified applicants, and only after the required public notice of availability has been published. Whether that notice ever ran is a question worth an answer.

Here is the one I'd rather have. Fairfield has other completed developments with deed-restricted affordable units. It also has, by the Planning Department's own count as of this spring, about 1,934 housing units approved and not yet built — roughly 382 of them below-market. Every one of those will need somebody to verify who moves in.

Affordability plans of this kind give the Commission express authority, at any reasonable time, to inspect the property and examine the Administrator's books and records.

Does anyone read the annual reports? Has that audit power ever been used?

Westway is not remarkable because the rule was missing. The rule was there, the form was there, the deadline was there, the filing was made. It is remarkable because it turns out that a document can arrive at Town Hall every January, say the wrong thing in plain numbers, and be filed away for five years — and that the way we found out was a neighbor going and looking.

A regulation is not a mechanism. Somebody has to open the envelope.

Emily Hau is a Fairfield resident and a filed candidate for State Representative in the 132nd District. emilyforfairfield.com

Documents cited: April 2017 Affordability Plan for Westway Road, LLC; Order to Comply dated May 13, 2024; Notices of Violation dated January 29, 2026; letter of August 4, 2026 from the Town's counsel to the Zoning Board of Appeals — all in the Board's public file for applications PZ-26-0171 and PZ-26-0172. Hearing testimony as reported by Gretchen Webster, "Fairfield Developers Under Fire for Living in Affordable Units," CT Examiner, August 7, 2026. Honestly, it is maybe worse than it sounds. -EH

Read the TPZ series:

Part 1: How Fairfield's TPZ chairman spends his day job advising New York housing-finance lenders — and why his public posts about that work matter for the residents whose zoning he votes on. Read Part 1

Part 2: How Fairfield's TPZ chairman voted three times against engaging outside legal counsel on Connecticut's new housing law — and why his New York day job involves advising on exactly that kind of legislation. Read Part 2

Part 3: The developer-initiated zoning regulation amendments now in front of the Commission, and the specific 0.92-acre Mill Hill Road parcel one of them appears to have been drafted for. Read Part 3

Part 4: How Fairfield's TPZ chairman used a bylaws subcommittee to constrain a sitting commissioner — and why the video of her resignation isn't on the Town's official YouTube. Read Part 4

Part 5: How Fairfield's planning director misstated a regulation her own office had just drafted — and why her misstatement defined a 4-3 vote that left downtown unprotected. Read Part 5

Part 6: How Fairfield's TPZ Vice Chairman responded to parts 1-5 of the series — and why the response, which does not dispute a single fact, is the record's strongest possible endorsement. Read Part 6

Part 7: How Fairfield's TPZ Vice Chairman reassured residents that Tuesday's traffic amendment "does not replace the Commission's judgment" — without mentioning how many future applications will never reach the Commission at all. Read Part 7

Part 8: How a traffic regulation drafted eighteen months ago, before the state law that made it matter, consumed an entire meeting — and why its author limited the debate on it. Read Part 8

You're reading Part 9: How both affordable units at a Southport condominium development ended up with the developer who screened the applicants and with his business partner's son — and how the paperwork showing it sat in a Town file for five years.

Part 10 (coming soon): Why the architectural standards now before the Commission need more eyes on them than they are getting — and what's already been written into other regulations on the assumption they'll pass.