Commentary––

Keeping The Cities In Their Place

By William A. Collins

City’s fortunes,

All undone;

It let in,

Just anyone.

The Democratic mayors of Westport and Stamford, having recently savaged Bridgeport’s proposal for an Indian casino, decided they’d better try to paper over the breech. Thus they organized a “summit” in that troubled city, to show that they really care after all.

Self-righteousness gushed from every mouth. Park City leaders were assured that everything would be all right if they just rooted out corruption and put more cops on the street. Bridgeport’s new mayor also did his best to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, dutifully ticking off his city’s modest assets.

Somehow the issue of poverty never came up. All those solicitous suburbanites managed to avoid mentioning it, largely because it is their own zoning policies that squeeze most of the region’s poor into Bridgeport. This phenomenon makes the city unappealing to developers, and forces it to deal with the bulk of the area’s social problems. And a casino, the one solution that might make a real dent in this dilemma, has been ruled unacceptable by the city’s neighbors. They forecast that the dreaded gambling hall would have increased traffic, and by providing thousands of new jobs, would have increased wage rates all up and down the Gold Coast. This would have ended civilized life as we know it.

But Bridgeport’s plight, and the flow of suburban crocodile tears, is not unique within the state. Other Nutmeg cities suffer as well. Hartford surely has it worst. Being the capital, it bears the special burden of hosting endless tax-exempt properties. That means it must constantly badger the legislature, often unsuccessfully, for enough state aid to keep afloat. Enduring as well the state’s lowest household income and highest school segregation, Hartford, like Bridgeport, is not making much headway toward prosperity.

There is, though, one very different wrinkle in Hartford’s case. Its inner-ring suburbs have been much less attentive to zoning than have their wealthier, savvier, cousins in Fairfield County. By this we mean that they have allowed in more apartments and have not pressed as hard for gentrification. As a result, with the ebb and flow of the state’s economic tide, poor folks have gradually found openings in East Hartford, West Hartford, Bloomfield, South Windsor, and a few other spots. Thus poverty has to some degree moved to the ‘burbs, bringing modest trauma to those towns, too.

But overall, the disparity between rich and poor towns in Connecticut continues to widen. In the five poorest, the value of homes over the past decade, believe it or not, actually went down. So did their amount of tax base per capita. Given suburbia’s common experience with exploding property values, this anomaly may be hard to fathom. That’s because the press doesn’t give much coverage to what’s really happening in the central cities.

Not surprisingly, income, like property values, grew much faster out in the suburbs too, with a couple intriguing exceptions. It seems that two of the state’s five poorest towns, New London and Plainfield, amazingly saw sharp increases in earnings. Both, of course, lie near the Indian casinos, and both benefited dramatically from all those new jobs. That’s why Bridgeport, being poor but not dumb, wanted one too. And why the cheap-labor-dependent Gold Coast, being rich but not dumb, doesn’t want them to get it.

Maintaining these urban islands of poverty in a sea of wealth is not a big trick in Connecticut. The General Assembly is dominated by the suburbs, and not likely to require that they share what they have with cities. That means that urban rescue will always have to be a bootstrap operation. Unfortunately such struggles are not often crowned with success.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)