‘Wave of younger adults’ could lead Danbury’s growth
Report: City’s population boom set to outpace county’s
DANBURY — The city’s population is poised to grow six times the rate of Fairfield County over the next two decades and make Danbury younger in the process, a consultant has told local leaders.
“Some of this (projection) is based on migration, but most of it is based on birthrate and the number of kids you have in your schools,” said Francisco Gomes, a manager at FHI Studio, who Danbury has hired help the city revamp its 20-year-old master plan. “[T]he city has a really good opportunity now to make sure it can capture that wave of younger adults who are going to be naturally moving into those age cohorts.”
The population projections, which Gomes called “really positive for Danbury,” are part of a larger demographic picture he presented to city leaders last week about housing, education, jobs and the makeup of city households.
The next step, expected in April, is to launch a public outreach campaign with a website and schedule of community meetings to highlight information the city has gathered over the last five months, and share with residents the group’s strategy to develop a new master plan that would be adopted in late 2022.
“We have all this great data, but the real question is now what?” said Arnold Finaldi, the chairman of Danbury’s Planning Commission and a
member of the group overseeing the revamping of the city’s master plan, formally known as the Plan of Conservation and Development. “We have to decide what to do with it.”
The update is more than something the state mandates every 10 years; but a collective effort to agree on the values that will shape the future of the state’s seventh largest city.
Sharon Calitro, the city’s planning director, has called for “a major public component as part of this update.”
Danbury’s 2002 Plan of Conservation and Development, which was updated in
2013, called for open space conservation, historic preservation, housing affordability, congestion management and high-density housing on downtown Main Street, for example.
Since that plan was updated, Danbury has become one of fastest growing towns in Connecticut, and the city’s school-aged population has swelled. The trend is expected to continue, the consultant Gomes told city leaders last week, with Generation X leading the way.
“Like most of Connecticut, Danbury’s population has grown older on average with a greater share of residents over
55 in every age group since
2010, and that is associated with the baby boomers just cresting through, getting older and older,” Gomes said. “When we break out these population projections by age, you are going to gain most of that population in your younger folks — exactly the population where you have a
deficit right now — so that’s the good news.”
In contrast, the surrounding towns in Fairfield County are not expected to grow over the next two decades but to see the county population drop by 4 percent by 2040, Gomes said. The same projections show Danbury growing by
12 percent from its current
85,000 to 95,000 people. Other highlights from Gomes’ demographic research:
⏩ Danbury is twice as diverse as both Fairfield County and Connecticut when measured by its percentage of non-white residents, its percentage of foreign-born residents and its percentage of Englishlanguage learners.
⏩ Danbury is not as dense as one might expect for a city, compared to the density of surrounding Fairfield County. Danbury has a density of 1,900 residents per square mile, compared to Fairfield County at 1,500 residents per square mile. ⏩ Danbury’s unemployment numbers, which have traditionally been among the lowest in the state, dipped to a 20-year low of 2.7 percent in March 2020, just before the coronavirus crisis changed everything.