Margaret Brown ‘17

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

Fall 2014

A constant stream of steamy haze hangs over the cracked Madison Street blacktop pavement like a suffocating blanket, as the blistering sun basking overhead beats ruthlessly on the earth below in the year’s final assault of scorching summer weather. As my eyes scour the lifeless street anticipating the sight of children carelessly riding their bikes with the current of the wind at their backs, I begin to discern the signs of desolation that have become all too common in describing the current landscape of urban (just) Hartford today. Rows of abandon buildings line either side of the road, their sorry paint jobs flaking off with the wave of the late afternoon wind, and their foundations crumbling despondently to the stagnant earth below. Collapsed porches adorn the front of the lonely buildings, and the overgrowth of deserted shrubbery and vegetation swallow the entrance. Despite the light of the afternoon sun, Madison Street is a ghost town, one of the many Podunk-like neighborhoods to have engulfed the city of Hartford following the period of deindustrialization that strangulated the area into its current state of economic challenge. Currently suffocated by the restrictions of extreme poverty, urban Hartford and its Podunk neighborhoods have become dwelling grounds for those with nowhere else to go, casting an image of a hopeless city with empty pockets. But, there is hope in reversing the demise of Podunk Hartford – a hope that lies in the innocent promise of the city’s youth population and future generation of leaders.

In what Andrew Walsh would discern as the third stage of Harford’s five-stage global history (in Xiangming Chen and Nick Bacon ’10 edited book, Confronting Urban Legacy), or the Golden Period, in the history of Hartford, “industrialization brought an uneven sort of prosperity to the region”, which ultimately designated the urban center for its eventual decline.[1] As industry in Hartford began to flourish from 1830 to 1890, an extreme wealth disparity gap began to emerge amongst residents, with manufacturing producing enormous profits for skilled workers that were not levied onto the poor working class. This began the process of class segregation in the region, which often naturally followed racial and immigrant profiles, and began to separate the rich and the poor into distinguishing enclave communities within the city based on their economic position in society.[2]

This trend continued into the World War II era, as manufacturing giant Pratt & Whitney brought considerable economic benefits to Hartford’s urban center that were distributed unequally amongst the social classes. Financial gains elongated due to wartime production profits interested jobseekers from the South in the Great Migration, attracting members of the working class to a region unable to offer a balanced supply and demand in the employment sector and already teetering on the verge of severe economic inequality. Eventually, industrial giants such as Pratt & Whitney executed a transition of their manufacturing plants from urban to suburban locations in an expansion effort, moving the job opportunities of the working class outside of the city to an area that they could not afford to live in themselves. Essentially, this abandoned the poor working class inside the limits of the city without reliable work, adding to the woes of their pessimistic financial situations. With this, the prosperity of Walsh’s fourth stage of development ceased, and “white flight” emptied the city of nearly all of its wealthy and middle class residents unwilling to live amongst the increasing poverty submerging the city, as families migrated to the nearby affluent suburbs in search of homes boasting larger living environments, green space, and neighbors whose racial and economic situation mirrored their own.[3]

This transfer of industry outside of the city, known as deindustrialization, was further stimulated by the “the construction of a new and expansive interstate highway network that linked Hartford to bedroom suburbs,” which allowed for white-collar workers to live independent of the city, while continuing to rake in the benefits of the downtown financial industry and business. This further worsedn the regression of the city’s wealth, and the formation of the highway system led Hartford into its fifth, and current, stage of development, leaving behind only immigrants and the poor to reside within urban limits. In this current stage, a limited amount of solutions has been crafted to respond to the problems left in the wake of deindustrialization, such as the construction of Connecticut Convention Center and Connecticut Science Center. In the meantime, Hartford has become increasingly racially and economically diverse. With the absence of an upper and middle class, Hartford became the city of poverty and deficiency that it is documented as today, as “the region became a place of slow, sometimes negligible, growth in economy and population.”[4]

The poverty left in the wake of deindustrialization and massive “white flight” to the surrounding suburban areas has left many neighborhoods within the limits of Hartford’s urban region to transition from flourishing cultural enclaves to destitute areas struggling to stay afloat. In what Nick Bacon would characterize as a Podunk, especially in East Hartford but really across the region as a whole, numerous Hartford neighborhoods including areas such as Madison Street, have become empty and unrecognizable due to economic decline, and revival efforts have done little to impede the process of regression due to extreme poverty. In the process of “podunkification”, “jobs are lost, property values plummet, and communities disappear.”[5] This causes inhabitants of the area to become disconnected to the influence of the urban area on their lives, drawing people emotionally away from the neighborhood, while physically they must remain behind due to economic barriers. The result produces communities without unity or concern for one another, and fosters an environment where people choose to live simply due to the constraints of their financial situation. In the Podunk’s of Hartford, no true community exists, as it is merely an area of poverty that people feel trapped within, instead of positively connected to.[6] People have lost the community identity and emotional attachment in the face of overwhelming poverty.

Podunk neighborhoods adorn many sections of modern Hartford, as the remnants of deindustrialization have left city residents predominantly unable to invest the necessary capital to transform their communities back into the cultural enclaves that they embodied prior to their monetary demise. They are not difficult to spot with the naked eye, as Podunk neighborhoods often display outward characteristics associated with neighborhood tipping such as poor property maintenance, numerous abandoned buildings, untrimmed vegetation, cars parked on the lawn, loud noise, and countless for rent or sale signs in a small geographic area.[7] Podunk neighborhoods also routinely possess invisible characteristics as well that include rapid turnover of tenants, rodent infestation, absentee ownership, and redlining by banks and insurance companies.[8] The combination of these factors causes the neighborhood to become an undesirable place to live, and forces those bound to the area to withdraw from it emotionally, further prompting its ultimate demise.

The problem with the Podunk neighborhoods within the Hartford region is that they are currently too economically poor and unsustainable to reverse their current fate of despair in the near future. As Louise Simmons remarks, “the persistence of poverty in Hartford is arguably the most deeply rooted social issue that has confronted city leaders and residents for decades, as the population is exceedingly poor.”[9] With nearly a third of the total population living below the federal poverty line, and nearly half of the city’s children falling below this line as well, the residents of Hartford’s Podunk simply do not possess the economic capability to reverse the disunity and despair of the city. And outside donation and investment in the social service sector will not erase Hartford’s urban Podunk neighborhoods either, for that only addresses the issue of poverty at the surface. As poverty researcher Mark Rank asserts, “poverty is a result of structural failings: lack of opportunities to escape poverty and a society that has come to rely on low-wage work.”[10] Therefore, the only way for Hartford to address the current landscape of its Podunk urban areas is to tackle the root of poverty at a structural level, by empowering the youth of the city to transform their perception of their environment, and to instill hope back into a community that has for too long been forlorn.

While empowering the youth of Hartford to connect directly to the region that constitutes their home is not the fastest way to bring the Podunk neighborhoods of the city back to life, it is the only way that will address the cause of Podunkification at the root. By fostering an environment in which children believe in their ability to succeed, they will connect emotionally to the neighborhood that has raised them, and begin to see the area as an irreplaceable symbol of home. Therefore, Hartford must focus its investments on providing quality education and resources to the city’s children, so that they may flourish into the greatest generation of future urban region leaders as possible. As children begin to succeed, they will bring the sentiments of belief, hope, and perseverance into the Podunk neighborhoods where they grew up, which will gradually allow Hartford to once again locate the sentiments of place and connection that it lost through deindustrialization so many years ago.[11]

It is here that the social service sector can play a critical role in the reversal of Hartford’s Podunk neighborhoods. While simply investing money into new housing projects will not solve community problems at the root, investing money into the urban youth population will. This is something that I have seen firsthand through my internship experience this semester at Our Piece of the Pie, a Hartford non-profit that runs social service programs for at-risk youth in the city. Here, I have learned that putting time and effort, compassion and care into the city’s youth will pay far greater gains in the long run than immediate financial donation will. By investing hope and prospect into the children of Hartford, the city can construct the leaders that it will ultimately need to climb out of its current economic hole.

I have worked with one youth this particular semester who has achieved a 3.97 grade-point-average in the classroom since her time as a youth member of Our Piece of the Pie, and has achieved an impressive extracurricular sheet that has put her in a position where she will be able to attend college, enabling her to effectively escape the Podunk neighborhood where she was raised. However, because of the assistance of Our Piece of the Pie, she realizes her duty to reinvest her skills and attitude into her community, and has promised that one day she will return to her Podunk Hartford community in an effort to establish fundamental and structural change. As she has told me herself, “I want to help my sister out, I want to help my mother out, and I want to help all of the people around me who helped me get to this point…my success is in part their success as well.”

This exact cycle of development and return is the exact cycle that the city of Hartford needs to strive for with each and every member of its youth population if it is ever going to succeed in one day climbing out of the Podunk enclave that it has become in the wake of deindustrialization. It will not happen over the course of a year, but gradually Hartford can put their Podunk neighborhoods back on the map through their youth, as revived cultural enclaves flourishing with culture and prosperity that will attract prospective residents for many generations to come.