Howard Kaplan Memorial Lecture on Law and Society - Affordable Housing: What’s Law Got to Do with It?

Richard Freedman, President of Garden Homes Management, and Anika Singh Lemar, Clinical Professor of Law at Yale Law School, will debate affordable housing and whether current statutes and litigation are the best way to meet the housing crisis confronting Stamford and neighboring communities.

This lecture is part of the annual Howard Kaplan Memorial Lecture on Law and Society.

Richard Freedman is president of Garden Homes Management, a family real estate business based in Stamford that was founded by his father, Joel, in 1962. Garden Homes owns and manages more than 9,000 rental housing units in 130 properties throughout the Northeast. Freedman has developed nearly 1,000 units of housing on a for-profit and philanthropic basis using the resources of the company’s charitable foundation, the Garden Homes Fund. He has extensive experience building housing under Connecticut’s Affordable Housing Land Use Appeal Act, also known as 8-30g. The opposition of planning and zoning commissions and the public to his affordable housing applications have shaped his beliefs that zoning is the key barrier to fair housing and that far more multifamily rental housing should be built in Connecticut’s wealthy towns. Freedman has been chairman of the Stamford Board of Finance since 2015 and was president of the Stamford Board of Education. Freedman received a bachelor's degree in computer science from Yale University and a master's in business administration from the Yale School of Management.

Anika Singh Lemar is a clinical professor at Yale Law School where she teaches the Community and Economic Development clinic (CED). CED’s clients include affordable housing developers, small businesses, community development financial institutions, farms and farmers' markets, fair housing advocates, cooperatives and neighborhood associations. Lemar also writes about land use, zoning and affordable housing. She is currently the editor-in-chief of the American Bar Association’s Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institute’s Metropolitan Policy Project. She has served on a variety of boards and commissions including the board of the Connecticut Bar Foundation, the Commission on Connecticut’s Development and Future, the City of New Haven’s Affordable Housing Commission, and the board of New Haven Bank.

Howard C. Kaplan, a native of the Bronx, NY, moved to Stamford as a graduate of Yale Law School to join Wofsey, Rosen, Kweskin and Kuriansky, where he eventually became a partner and remained for his entire legal career. A pillar of the community, Kaplan also served on the Stamford Board of Representatives, and was a founding member of the Stamford Board of Ethics, president of the Stamford Child Care Center, and director and counsel to the Stamford Land Conservation Trust.

This lecture is supported by the Stamford law firm Wofsey, Rosen, Kweskin and Kuriansky and the family of the late Howard Kaplan.