Many people are in crisis because they cannot find an affordable, decent place to live. Most of them may have a shelter over their heads but paying for it so drains their resources that other bills go unpaid, needs like healthcare get set aside, and the means to save for a better life is blocked.

These people, most working but not earning enough to make ends meet, often settle for substandard housing in crowded neighborhoods.

Last Sunday, The Day published the first stories in what will be a year-long project to document this crisis of insufficient affordable housing, examine the causes, and look at solutions. The newspaper calls the series the “Housing Solutions Lab.”

As the initial stories show, this is an extremely complex problem driven by numerous factors. But one contributing cause is straightforward. It is selfishness, defined in my Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary as “concern with one’s own welfare or advantage in disregard for others.”

Selfishness is what primarily drives the strong opposition in our more affluent suburban communities to steps that would chip away at the problem. Amending zoning rules to allow small-lot development in some sections, providing more opportunities and incentives for multifamily construction, or even encouraging a return of duplexes could enlarge the stock of housing that is affordable for working people on the lower echelons of the pay scale.

In my many years of reporting, and later as an opinion editor and writer, I was always taken aback by the fervent opposition development plans often faced. Proposals for apartment buildings with affordable units met with cries about increased traffic, noise, and more kids in the school system. They still do. Zoning proposals to allow multifamily units or smaller building lots face lamentations that that they will lower property values and destroy a town’s “quality of life.”

I have heard warnings that water supplies will be taxed, aquifers threatened, and wailings that trees will be removed from Mother Earth.

That is if such proposals even surface. Few do because the prospects for success are so slim and the opposition so apparent.

Often largely absent from these debates is the reality that the working people serving these communities need places to live. The developer seeking the zone change or tax incentive may make the point, but it can come across as self-serving. Depending on the nature of the project, an affordable housing advocate may testify, but the dominant voice typically comes from the opposition, often well-financed enough to hire an attorney to find any means necessary to block the proposal.

The legislature has tried to address the issue with legislation that allows a developer to sue a town if the developer can demonstrate the community has a lack of affordable housing yet is using local land-use rules to stop his plans to build some. Despite the law, a town can block such a project in court by showing it will create a risk to public health or safety if it moves forward.

This approach places a heavy burden on the developer, while creating added legal expenses. It assures lengthy delays, sometimes years long. And it is not hard for a good opposition attorney to produce evidence of public health and safety issues. Since its implementation in 1990, the law has shown only modest success, creating an estimated 8,500 units of affordable housing. That rate of development is not going to address the crisis.

I grew up in a two-family tenement in Providence. My dad bought it to provide an affordable place for us to live — I had two brothers — and to provide an apartment upstairs for my grandmother, who was a widow.

It was a neighborhood filled with working people. My dad was a firefighter, mom a receptionist and clerical worker. A police officer and his sizable family lived across the street. There were small business owners, teachers, factory, government and retail workers, but also lawyers and doctors. The houses of the latter were often nicer, the cars sometimes Cadillacs instead of Fords or Chevys, but it all added up to community.

While ethnically diverse, it was not racially so.

Now we have far greater economic segregation, while racial integration remains largely non-existent in many of our communities, despite legislation that long ago outlawed discrimination in housing.

My wife Kathy and I bought our home in Jewett City in 1985, a densely developed working-class borough in the town of Griswold. It was affordable on my modest reporter’s salary. Kathy worked various part-time jobs, and sometimes stayed home full-time, as we raised three sons, now all launched. She settled in as a librarian at our local Slater Library a couple of decades back. We still live there.

In the 1990s a senior apartment complex was built adjacent to our property. More recently a large apartment complex, featuring townhouses, was built just down the street. The developer continues to add townhouses. As far as I know, no great opposition surfaced to oppose these projects. I was not inclined to do so. Is there more traffic? Probably. But I have never bothered to count cars while seated on my porch, nor thought of hiring someone to do so.

People need a place to live.

You cannot legislate changes in attitude. And elected leaders representing Connecticut suburbia and the state’s rural communities are unlikely to back tougher measures to force acceptance of affordable housing, not when their constituents don’t want it.

Needed is a change of hearts and minds. The situation can improve if people view the folks who would populate these proposed developments as fellow citizens in pursuit of their own American dreams, rather than as invaders out to sully their “quality of life.”

Paul Choiniere is the former editorial page editor of The Day, now retired. He can be reached at p.choiniere@yahoo.com.