Andrew Calabrese ‘17 

An Essay for From Hartford to World Cities (URST 201)

Fall 2014

In the course of American history, few urban centers have experienced as tumultuous a rise and fall as the city of Hartford, Connecticut.  Once one of the country’s most powerful economic centers, Hartford has struggled mightily in recent times, having fallen victim to rapid deindustrialization and suburbanization during the middle of the twentieth century.  While downtown remains at most viable (just viable at best) on the back of the financial services industry, much of the city is characterized by intense poverty and isolation.  Today, Hartford is one of the poorest cities in the nation.  Yet all of these problems are set against the backdrop of a highly successful metropolitan region, in which wealth, quality education, and strong public services abound.  This dichotomy at first appears perplexing, but with deeper scrutiny is revealed to be the product of a highly fragmented political climate in which regional governance and cooperation are shunned in favor of home rule.  To understand the dynamics of the wide quality of life disparity between Hartford and its metro region, one can take a comparative view at another Connecticut polity, Hamden.  Although it is one single town and its problems do not run as deep as Hartford’s, Hamden is characterized by a similar gap between its wealthiest and poorest citizens.  By examining how a town government is able to combat such problems in Hamden, one can more fully understand what Hartford could achieve with a unified, regional mode of governance.

Since the mid-twentieth century, Hartford’s story has largely been one of deindustrialization, population decline, and rising poverty.  Due to global economic forces, the vast majority of the city’s industrial concerns either downsized significantly or moved away entirely after World War II.  Pratt & Whitney, once one of the largest employers in the region, has slashed over 30,000 jobs since the 1960s.[1]  Because of the decline in manufacturing, the overwhelming majority of Hartford’s high-skill employment is now found in the insurance industry and related fields, long the city’s dominant sector.  Although the insurance industry continues to thrive in Hartford, its dynamics present a problem that threatens the long term health of the city.  Of the 121,000 people who work in Hartford proper, 83% commute in every day, returning to the suburbs at night.[2]  Thus, the fruits of high-paying, white-collar jobs do not accrue to Hartford residents themselves, but to the residents of surrounding towns such as Glastonbury, Avon, and Simsbury.  Hartford residents are therefore often left with menial, low-wage jobs in the service sector.  Economic disparity of this sort fosters an environment in which wealthy suburban residents enjoy high property values and quality services, while Hartford residents struggle to make ends meet.

Thirty-two miles south of Hartford, nestled in the hills just north of New Haven, is the town of Hamden, CT.  Home to roughly 60,000 people, Hamden is one of New Haven’s largest suburbs, and borders on qualifying as a city itself.  Despite its suburban status, Hamden’s character is anything but cookie-cutter.  Due to its close proximity to New Haven, Hamden is home to a large number of medical professionals, academics, and other white collar employees associated with either Yale University or New Haven’s historically strong business community.  Yet this proximity to New Haven also makes it home to a large area of relative poverty, chiefly in the southern section that borders the city.  The result of this environment is a large income disparity between Hamden’s neighborhoods, with some being defined by affluence, many middle class, and some very poor.  In many ways, the preceding description could be one of the Hartford metro regions, making a comparison of Hamden and Hartford relevant in understanding the nature of income disparity and solutions aimed at dealing with it.

Perhaps the single most determinant factor in a city’s success is its wealth, measured in either GDP, property values, or tax revenue.  While social and environmental factors also have their place in “grading” a city, the supreme law of urbanism seems to be that the cities with the richest citizens are often the most successful.  The implications of an affluent tax base are obvious, as high revenues allow a local government to provide better public services across the board.  Nowhere are these implications more obvious than in Hamden and Hartford, where the respective tax bases and service provision vary markedly.  Although Hamden has a significant pocket of poverty, it is able to provide adequate services to the entire town by drawing on strong tax revenues from its more affluent areas through a kind of intra-local redistribution.  Thus, every citizen, regardless of economic background, enjoys access to quality education, police and fire, and trash removal services. While the more affluent areas of town are certainly home to more numerous and generally more successful businesses, this is a result of private development, not public action.  In terms of providing public services, Hamden puts households with drastically different economic means on an equal playing field, which is no small feat in today’s increasingly unequal urban world.  By combining affluence and poverty under one government, Hamden is able to provide its poor with the same services as its rich, somewhat softening the blow of income disparity.

Hamden’s success in providing its poor with public services stands in stark contrast to Hartford’s relative failure to do so.  Due to large demographic trends such as “white flight” and suburbanization, Hartford today finds itself as a type of metropolitan ghetto, home to the most impoverished residents of a region defined by affluence.  But unlike Hamden, which is able to use taxes from the wealthy to benefit the poor, Hartford is politically isolated from the wider metro region, putting it in a position to deal with poverty on its own.  The challenges presented by such isolation are evident in the city’s public services, which lack well behind those in more affluent suburbs.  To illustrate this point, one need not look farther than the public education system.  Once considered to be among the best in the region, Hartford Public High School nearly lost its accreditation in the 1990s as a result of the drastic urban decline taking place in the city.[3]  Meanwhile, Avon High School, located in Hartford’s wealthiest suburb, rose to occupy the region’s top spot.  The divergent fortunes of these two high schools speak to the nearly unbreakable correlation between affluence, high tax revenues, and quality education.  Unless it develops a wider and more diverse regional tax base, Hartford will likely never be able to provide the type of quality education or other services found in places like Avon, a reality that has dire implications for long-term economic and social development.  As Jason Rojas and Lyle Wray note, “Many of the challenges faced at the metropolitan level…demand regional responses that are well beyond the capacity of any single municipality.”[4]

Aside from purely quantitative measures of income and education level, one can view the differences between Hartford and Hamden through a qualitative, social lens.  Because they are unified under one government, the rich and poor of Hamden share many similar experiences, most obviously through the educational and recreational systems.  Children from affluent and impoverished backgrounds attend the local middle and high schools together, play on the same sports teams, and participate in the same clubs and activities.  This serves to foster a more coherent social system that is less defined by income and more defined by purely human qualities. It also nurtures democratic values and decreases the race and ethnic segregation. That is not to say that prejudices do not still exist, as it is unfortunately very difficult to fully eliminate racial and economic discrimination (good caveat).  Ultimately, however, Hamden’s rich and poor are tied by much stronger bonds than commonly found in disparate areas.

Contrast this experience with Hartford, which suffers from discrimination at both an urban and regional level.  As a student at Trinity, I have observed firsthand the social chasm that exists between a predominantly white, affluent student body and an overwhelmingly poor, minority neighborhood.  Many Trinity students are afraid to walk the streets of Hartford, and view campus not only as a physical bubble, but as a social one as well, a haven of wealth tucked away in a city of poverty.  These same prejudices undoubtedly exist throughout the metro region between wealthy suburbanites and poor urban dwellers.  It is important to note that such prejudice is often not the product of inherent hate or discrimination, but rather of a lack of experience interacting with people from different racial and economic backgrounds. Where Hamden is able to improve relations between races and classes through shared services, Hartford is unable to fully unite the diverse groups that comprise its fragmented metropolitan region.

Viewing the differences between Hamden and Hartford, one is able to infer a few key takeaways.  First, although a single town, Hamden demonstrates how the pains of income disparity can be eased through the integration of rich and poor into one tax base that facilitates a wide provision of quality public services.  Second, Hamden shows how the sharing of educational and recreational opportunities is able to foster a deeper understanding and connection between people of different means and backgrounds.  The implications of Hamden’s experience on Hartford’s future are obvious.  Unless the Hartford metro region comes together to either pool its tax base or jointly provide key services, it will be unable to close the socioeconomic gap between its richest and poorest citizens.  While the challenges of unifying an entire region are exponentially greater than unifying a few neighborhoods, the Hartford metro area can, and must, work towards developing some mode of cooperative governance that resembles that found in the town of Hamden.  Unless it is able to do so, the city of Hartford will find itself in an ever more precarious state, inching closer and closer to the “point of no return.”