By Chris Powell
Back in the 1950s many Connecticut cities had populations about 50% larger than they are today. In his address to the General Assembly as it reconvened this month, Governor Lamont said he wants them to grow back to their old size.
He’s right that the cities are where most of any population growth in the state should go, since infrastructure is already in place there. Such growth would diminish controversy about exclusive zoning in the suburbs.
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Of course there will be no solving Connecticut’s housing shortage unless the Trump administration stops the flood of illegal immigration engineered by the Biden administration and assisted by the Democrats who control state government. Having supported the flood for so long, Connecticut’s Democratic regime carefully overlooks the connection between illegal immigration and the housing shortage. Without illegal immigration, the shortage might be only half as severe.
But before much can be done to regrow the cities, state government will have to understand the causes of their decline — in both population and quality of life.
To some extent the decline resulted from the increasing ownership of automobiles and then construction of the interstate highway system, which, necessary as it may have been for commerce and national defense, turned out to be used as much for increasing the distance people were willing to travel between their homes and their jobs. Cars and highways redirected housing construction away from the cities.
But in recent years technology also has redirected employment away from the cities. Many office workers now can work from home almost anywhere, and basic manufacturing has moved to countries with lower wages.
While city life retains its old attractions — civic, cultural, educational, medical, theatrical, and sports institutions — its disadvantages are worse than ever: the poverty of most city residents and the resulting terrible performance of city schools, crime, the incompetence and inefficiency of city government, and horribly high property taxes.
Regional “magnet” schools offer some escape from city schools that are overwhelmed by disadvantaged children, but getting middle-class families to return to the cities is unlikely until their demographics improve. In recent years the cities have drawn new middle-class residents mainly from same-sex couples and “empty nesters,” not so much from couples with school-age children.
Stamford seems to be the exception among Connecticut’s cities. It has some poverty but is not swamped by it like the others, because its nearness to New York City and its commuter service from the Metro-North Railroad have driven up the city’s housing prices and rents and kept them at Fairfield County levels. That is, Stamford’s demographics are strong in large part because it does not have that much of what the rest of the state badly needs — “affordable” housing.
If Connecticut’s housing shortage gets desperate enough, new market-rate housing in the cities might draw some middle-class people back, at least for a while. But for the long term there is probably not much chance of making the cities attractive to a wide range of people without elevating or dispersing the poor, and the suburbs won’t voluntarily take many of them and even most Democratic legislators are not inclined to force them to.
Government’s long failure to elevate the poor is Connecticut’s biggest problem and the cause of some of its other big problems.
If substantially more housing is built in Connecticut without more illegal immigration, the state’s cost of living could be reduced, which would help the poor along with everyone else.
But what keeps the poor down most are the state’s main policies toward them particularly — the welfare policies whose perverse incentives encourage childbearing outside marriage, perpetuate generational poverty, and lead to child neglect, and the educational policies that have destroyed academic standards in the schools poor children attend, schools that send many of them into the world prepared only for menial work.
Until the damage done by these policies is acknowledged officially, cities will find it hard to restore themselves.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 