By CHRIS POWELL
For decades Bridgeport has been Connecticut’s worst concentration camp for the poor, easily defeating Hartford, New Haven, and Waterbury for murders, mayhem, wretched poverty, and depravity. State government has taken the city seriously only in regard to the pluralities it produces for Democrats despite its seemingly eternal wretchedness.
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But the other day Bridgeport’s veteran journalist, author, and historian, Lennie Grimaldi, broke on his internet site, OnlyInBridgeport.com, what he fairly suggested could be Connecticut’s story of the year, though it is yet to be told elsewhere. That is, Bridgeport, long considered the state’s crime capital, having experienced 50 or more murders per year back in the 1990s, had only three in 2025, far below the year’s totals in New Haven (16) and Hartford (11). Other major crimes in the city are down too.
Meanwhile Bridgeport’s population is rising again and has surpassed 150,000, securing its status as the state’s largest city.
Grimaldi speculates that the improvement results in part from federal and local police action against gangs, improvements in housing projects, and more community engagement by the police. One must hope it’s not just a fluke.
Maybe the city’s old geographic advantages are reclaiming some appeal too. It has an excellent harbor and is developing a commercial and residential project there. It’s on the Metro-North and Amtrak rail line as well as Interstate 95, only slightly less convenient to New York City than prosperous Stamford but more convenient to New Haven’s higher education and medical institutions. The Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater downtown is a regional draw and a soccer stadium may be built. The city has a university and a community college.
But as with Connecticut’s other cities, Bridgeport’s overwhelming problem remains its demographics, its concentration of poverty, its lack of a large, self-sufficient middle class that can staff a more competent, less selfish municipal government, a government that remains compromised by excessive Democratic patronage and absentee ballot scandals.
And then, of course, there are the thousands of fatherless children in the city’s schools, many of them virtually illiterate and demoralized because of neglect at home. State government finally has taken note of the dysfunction of Bridgeport’s school system and is intervening somewhat, if not enough. But education will always be mostly a matter of parenting.
While the city’s property taxes remain nearly the highest in the state, property taxes are high in all Connecticut’s cities, in large part because of state government’s refusal to let cities control labor costs and its failure to insist on better results for the huge amount of state funding cities receive.
Mayor Joe Ganim may be doing as well as a mayor in Connecticut can do under urban circumstances. At least he seems to have put his corruption behind him, having been convicted and jailed after his first stint as mayor.
Neither Bridgeport nor Connecticut’s other cities can repair themselves on their own. Their futures will be determined mainly by how much the state wants its cities to do more than manufacture poverty while keeping the desperately poor and their pathologies out of the suburbs — whether the state ever wants to examine and act seriously against the policy causes of poverty, which were operating long before Donald Trump became president.
It should not require a Ph.D. to see that subsidizing childbearing outside marriage with various welfare benefits and then socially promoting fatherless children through school, leaving them uneducated in adulthood and qualified only for menial work, has not led them to self-sufficiency and prosperity but rather to dependence, generational poverty, and mayhem. Only the poverty administrators prosper from such policy.
Indeed, Connecticut seems to think that instead of two parents every child should have a social worker and a probation officer, as well as a “baby bonds” account with the state treasurer’s office to ease the burdens to be faced after being raised without two parents.
The “baby bonds” are new but the rest of it is old and just makes poverty worse.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 