Legal Battle Possible Over Unconventional Family In City Mansion

By Vanessa de la Torre

HARTFORD — The zoning dispute surrounding the unconventional family living in a West End mansion might be far from over, a lawyer representing the residents said Wednesday.

"It's really up to them to make some decisions," attorney Peter Goselin said after the zoning board of appeals on Tuesday upheld a city cease-and-desist order that might force the group to disband or sell the stately brick home.

The residents plan to have a meeting soon to determine their next steps, Goselin said. "I can tell you that my clients don't have any plans to put their house on the market," he said.

Goselin's remarks left open the possibility of a legal showdown over the city's definition of what constitutes a family — a zoning controversy set in one of Hartford's wealthiest residential neighborhoods.

The eight adults and three children who live in the nine-bedroom house at 68 Scarborough St. say they share chores, eat dinners together and lend emotional support, as many families do. The group of longtime friends also became financially intertwined when they bought the nearly 6,000-square-foot home for $453,000 last summer and pooled money into a bank account for household expenses.

But Hartford's decades-old zoning regulations define members of a family as those related by blood, marriage, civil union or legal adoption. And under the Scarborough Street area's strict zoning for single-family homes, the city limits the number of unrelated residents to two people in the same dwelling.

Neighbors have argued that the nontraditional household — two couples with children, a couple with no children and two individuals — violates the zoning code, and the city agreed when it issued the cease-and-desist order last fall after determining that the arrangement "doesn't meet the definition of a family," Thomas Deller, the city's director of development services, has said.

The homeowners then appealed the order to the zoning board of appeals. "We intentionally came together as a family," resident Julia Rosenblatt, a co-founder of the HartBeat Ensemble theater company and mother of two, has told The Courant.

On Wednesday, residents at the house said they were still processing Tuesday night's ZBA setback and referred questions to Goselin, who argued that Hartford's zoning code is antiquated and "blatantly unconstitutional" in its definition of families. He has also pointed out an outdated provision that allows an unlimited number of domestic servants to live in single-family homes.

Among the 11 occupants in the Scarborough mansion are Hartford public school teachers, a professor at Capital Community College and a stay-at-home dad. They've been called the "Scarborough 11."

Trinity College associate professor Jack Dougherty compared the current regulations to class-based exclusionary zoning, which is legal but "problematic," he said at Tuesday's public hearing.

Since the zoning battle became news in November, Goselin said his clients have been "very encouraged by the amount of public support that they've received." Even with the ZBA's unanimous vote to uphold the cease-and-desist order, some of the board members expressed remorse that they had to follow the zoning code as written, he said.

"They made it very clear that they believed my clients really are a family, which is a big thing," Goselin said. "This is what they're putting on the line: 'This is who we are.'"

One of the ZBA commissioners, Hartford lawyer Meghan Freed, said in an email Wednesday that the Scarborough household meets her "personal definition of family, and fits within the definition of family that I believe should be contained in Hartford's zoning regulations.

"That said, they do not fit within the definition of family under the current regulations by which the ZBA is bound," Freed said. "The ZBA's authority on an appeal is limited to whether there was an error in the zoning enforcement officer's cease-and-desist notice ... and in this case, there just wasn't an error."

Freed said Hartford should consider amending its zoning laws to "include a more modern and inclusive definition of family, and I hope that the planning and zoning commission — the body with the authority to amend the zoning regulations — agrees."

In a recent memo to the city, UConn law professor Sara Bronin, who specializes in land-use issues and is chairwoman of the Hartford Planning and Zoning Commission, suggested potential changes to the single-family zones that would offer a middle ground: permitting four unrelated people to operate as a family under certain regulations, and a cap on the number of domestic servants.

"The key weakness of Hartford's approach to functional families, in my view, is the limitation on the number of unrelated adults to two," Bronin wrote. "To some, it might seem difficult to justify limiting the number of unrelated adults to two when we allow an unlimited number of servants."

Nearby towns and Connecticut's other major cities are more permissive about the number of unrelated people that can be considered family, with Bridgeport, Danbury, New Haven and Stamford allowing up to four unrelated residents in a single home, Bronin said in the memo.

Bronin stressed that any future changes to the zoning regulations would not apply to the 68 Scarborough case.

Still, Goselin said Bronin's widely circulated proposal might influence how people view his clients' predicament.

"The content of her memo acknowledges, in so many words, that this is a lawsuit waiting to happen," Goselin said. "Whether it's us or somebody else who brings it. It may very well be us."

Bronin said Wednesday that single-family zoning and density has been on the commission's radar since at least 2013, and that her memo, while an attempt to address "inconsistencies" in the Hartford regulations, "does not address the issue of constitutionality."