The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
How inequality is paralyzing ‘America’s country club’
The state is caught in an economic straitjacket and there’s no easy way out
By July 2017, when the state was starting the fiscal year without a budget, Angela Serrano had been living at the state-supported Careways Shelter for Women and Children in New Haven for four months.
Serrano was shocked to find herself there when just a few short years ago she had a career, a mortgage and the comforts of middle class life.
The shelter, at that time housing 10 families near New Haven’s historic Wooster Square neighborhood, would be closed by September. The nonprofit group running Careways couldn’t afford to keep it open while state aid was tied up in budget deliberations — but Serrano, 46, was able to secure an apartment in New Haven for herself, her 17-year-old son and a 9-year-old grandson.
After a futile search for a job there, Serrano found work as a health care aide in Trumbull. She started night classes at Gateway Community College in New Haven at the end of May in hopes of earning her EMT certification — the ticket, she hopes, to a better-paying, more stable job.
But despite the progress she has made, Serrano and others like her share a sinking feeling that the state, by some measures the nation’s richest, is not working for them. It’s a feeling she shares with other workingclass Americans who can’t understand why the current economic prosperity seems to be passing them by.
Everything feels like a struggle. Serrano commutes a half-hour in the used car she bought, but the job in Trumbull pays $12.30 an hour, more than many of the available jobs in New Haven. Her state rental assistance ran out in April, so Serrano has been cobbling together overtime to make up the difference.
She doesn’t think her two-bedroom New Haven apartment, behind an alley and up two flights of stairs, is worth the nearly $1,000 a month she pays. But rent is high all over the state, and it’s a quiet place to read and write, with a park around the corner for her grandson.
“I focus on my home,” Serrano said. “With everything I’ve endured, it’s important to me.”
Serrano’s daily struggles are symptoms of a state in crisis. For decades, Connecticut coasted fat and happy off defense firms, insurance companies, and a handful of super-rich financiers who came for the manicured lawns and to escape higher taxes in New York and New Jersey. But the good times have ended, and Connecticut has been caught flat-footed.
Blue chip companies like General Electric have either left or are threatening to leave. A yawning budget deficit continues to loom over the state, amplified by some of the nation’s most glaring economic inequality. Towns like Greenwich, Westport, New Canaan and Darien share few priorities with Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport.
The state’s political leaders must choose between what seem like equally rotten options: cut services, and push more burden onto the urban poor, or hike taxes, and risk repelling both the suburban rich who pay much of the freight and new businesses that might consider moving here. Put simply, Connecticut is in a bind with precious little room to maneuver.
Connecticut’s troubles are extreme but hardly unique. The recovery that has entrenched the state into the haves and havenots has been unequal in other regions as well — from Florida to California and down to Texas.
As the stock market climbs but wages remain relatively flat, the state serves as a troubling bellwether of national priorities that seem to favor wealth creation for the few before investments in the broader economy.
From factories to finance, Connecticut’s early reputation was built on the reliable bedrock of manufacturing. The state’s industrious citizens made hats in Danbury, and forged brass in Waterbury; nearly every Wiffle Ball in the world still comes from Shelton. Samuel Colt invented and produced his Colt revolver in Hartford, and defense contractors like Remington Arms — which once employed 17,000 — turned Bridgeport into a boom town.
Over time, the state’s economy followed a familiar path, drifting away from manufacturing as companies found it cheaper to operate elsewhere. Remington fled Bridgeport for Arkansas by 1988, leaving behind a fireprone empty building on Barnum Avenue.
Not to worry, though. Defense contractors like Sikorsky Aircraft, insurance firms like Aetna in Hartford and white-collar behemoths like General Electric — some lured with tax breaks — kept the state humming and obscured looming challenges.
More than 400 hedge funds managing over $750 billion between them now call the state home. The state doled out incentives like a $35 million economic package to AQR Management of Greenwich and a $22 million economic development grant to Bridgewater Associates of Westport, the largest hedge fund in the world, in 2016.
And that worked. For a while.
But the Great Recession hit the state with frightening force. Connecticut’s economic output has contracted since 2008, and the population has shrunk to 3.588 million, about 14,000 fewer residents than its 2013 peak. General Electric left Connecticut for Boston in 2016, and earlier this year MassMutual announced it would close an office in Enfield that employs 1,500 people. The companies said they couldn’t attract young talent wanting an upscale urban lifestyle to troubled cities or placid suburbs.
What’s left: a bifurcated economy that produces wealth but doesn’t spread much of it out.