G’s Steak’s and Grinders is legit. Dude does it right. slices his own ribeye on-site. No frozen crap here. Burgers are good. Chicken is good. Man puts out good food. I am there weekly.

I see the MWND around. They jacked the price up this year though. Used to be about 90.

2 incomes, couple of kids. Earnings fluctuate based on how much the wife wants to work. At the time we bought we were making about $170k maybe. Bought a fixer-upper 2k sqft home in a nice shoreline town 8 years ago for 280k. (This was back before CT had recovered from 2008 pricewise). Sunk another 30k plus blood and sweat into it.

If you call ahead Lalibela will sell you a pack of injera.

I’d go North Haven over Hamden. Not really a coherent town, more hard-core suburban sprawl in feel, but Much easier to shoot down I-91 into New Haven than trying to go down Whitney with all the lights. Structurally Hamden government is F’d financially. Not sure how they are going to get out of it. That’s why the tax rate is so high. Maybe a renter doesn’t care, but would definitely not buy in Hamden, personally.

The DMV is home for me. CT is a nice place to raise a family, but I still miss DC. If you need to stay down there and can handle the moderate commute Annapolis is a really great town to live in. Much less congested than the VA side, still plenty to do and it has a great young community.

Go birds.

Shhhh.

MDC is currently a non-profit municipal Corp. it is wicked expensive and is a pain to work with on development in Hartford.

There’s 2 main reasons to only apportion a certain % of units as “affordable” while Maintaining a majority as market rate.

First, ideologically HUD and many advocates have pushed the idea of deconcentrating poverty. The old way was to build large tracts of subsidized housing in undesirable sections of urban areas. You can see this type of development all over (parts of) town. Most of that can’t be undone, and it can be very difficult to put together a funding stack for something that isn’t 95-100% subsidized, affordable. The newer idea is that the “poor” will have better outcomes if they are mixed in all together with other economically diverse families rather than segregated. This is some of the idea behind rental vouchers as well, but as we know voucher holders struggle to break out of economically depressed sections of town too. Having a small to medium % of units in a new construction can be a really good way to further deconcentration, depending on the particulars.

Second is money. Even with millions of government dollars, it is really, really expensive to build this type of housing, a cost that is compounded often by the strings attached to that government money. Government money that usually only makes up a minority share of actual costs. Eventually a building has to generate enough income to both pay staff and service the inevitable debt on the property as well. Additionally, “non-profit” doesn’t actually mean the organization doesn’t make a profit, it just means there’s a socially beneficial bent and the profits aren’t distributed to any kind of shareholder, they stay with the organization to further the mission.