Home values skyrocket in parts of Waterbury
If your vision of a real estate boomtown features luxury apartment complexes and gleaming Teslas, Waterbury’s WalnutOrange-Walsh neighborhood doesn’t quite fit the bill.
Instead, you’d find a lot of faded triple-deckers and minivans in this hilly district of the Brass City, along with the occasional dirtbike rider popping wheelies.
But Walnut-OrangeWalsh — along with 14 other neighborhoods in Waterbury — were the top performers in the state this year in terms of percentage increase in home value, according to a Hearst Connecticut Media analysis of Zillow data. The data made available by the company did not include all neighborhoods in Connecticut, but did include most of the state’s cities and many suburbs.
Waterbury’s WalnutOrange-Walsh, a gritty section of the state’s fourthpoorest city, came in at No. 1 on the list, with a 153.4 percent leap in home valuation from 2020 to February of this year. A typical home in the neighborhood, valued at $58,038 in 2020, is now worth $147,066.
“It’s changed,” said Belinda Weaver, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1968 and serves on the Waterbury Board of Alderman. “A lot of people have moved out, and other people have moved in.” Despite the newcomers, she adds, “there hasn’t been a big turnaround in my section.”
With just over 115,000 residents, Waterbury is divided into 47 distinct neighborhoods, according to a city map.
Adjacent to Waterbury’s central business district, Walnut-Orange-Walsh is surrounded on three sides by other neighborhoods with 100-percent-plus jumps in home value since 2020: New Pac to the north with a 115 percent increase; Berkeley Heights to the east with a 110.6 percent hike; and Crownbrook to the west with a 115.3 percent surge.
Other Waterbury neighborhoods with 150-percent-plus increases include Deerfield and Sunset, on the city’s eastern edge, and the Wolcott Road section of the East End.
Those triple-digit value increases in four years don’t quite capture the magnitude of the changes: A “typical” home in central Waterbury was likely worth as little as $30,000 in the 1990s — and sale prices in the last year for some homes in the center of town have topped $350,000.
“The rents have tripled and the demand by investors have gone up,” said Levi Yudkin, a Waterbury real estate agent who has sold 90 homes in the city in the last year. “Ten years ago, you would drive down the street somewhere and you’d see boarded-up houses. You don’t see that anymore.”
Rents rise and investors buy
Waterbury has been topping a lot of lists lately: The city ranked in the top 10 nationally for home value appreciation over the last year, according to Zillow, with homes jumping 17.4 percent in 2023 alone, compared to a national increase of 3.6 percent.
Waterbury is also among the top Connecticut cities in population growth, with more than 4,000 new residents since 2010, a near 4 percent increase.
The city has been gradually cleaning up its many abandoned industrial sites and sprucing up downtown buildings in recent years. But revitalization efforts don’t explain the extreme swing in home values in the last decade, as the city has yet to add major new employers or amenities.
To a real estate agent like Yudkin, Waterbury’s appeal to investors has its roots in the decades of economic decline after the closure of the city’s brass factories, which employed 50,000 people at their peak during World War II. Big factories left a legacy of thousands of units of worker housing, which plunged in value over the decades to become among the cheapest properties in the state.
“Where there’s a deal,
there’s a deal-seeker,” Yudkin said.
Deli reflects new face of city
Some of the explanation for Waterbury’s boom can be found at Rinconcito Ecuatoriano Deli 1389 N. Main St. at lunch hour.
Clusters of men in paintsplattered uniforms and construction company Tshirts sit with plates of chicken stew and fruit drinks on a recent Wednesday, chatting with the wait staff in Spanish. A steady stream of takeout customers leave with huge clusters of bagged meals on their way to job sites and other workplaces.
Rinconcito is one of more than a dozen restaurants and other businesses in the city currently run by immigrants from Ecuador, who have joined Italians, Puerto Ricans and Albanians in making Waterbury part of their American stories.
Paying in cash and fixing up old triple-decker, three-family houses, Ecuadorian families have been renovating homes across Waterbury and helping to draw new residents from New York and beyond, Waterbury Mayor Paul Pernerewski, Jr., said in an interview earlier this year.
“A lot of the three-family houses that are getting rehabbed, a lot of that has been done by the Ecuadorians taking them over and then living there with their families, and going on the next (house) and the next to the next,” Pernerewski
said. “They’re starting to transform whole parts of neighborhoods.”
Freshly painted homes with reinforced balconies line many streets in central Waterbury, in some cases overlooking debris-strew vacant lots or derelict factory sites.
On Ward Street in Walnut-Orange-Walsh, a street bordered by crumbling sidewalks and cratered with potholes, pristine blue siding covers one side of a house with new windows and a rebuilt porch out front. That home sold for $40,000 in 2020 and most recently sold for $150,000, in 2022. A similar house across the street sold for $376,000 on Dec. 18 of last year and is currently valued at $404,400, according to Zillow.
Another growing community in Waterbury is Orthodox Jews like Yudkin, who are playing an active role in real estate and redevelopment efforts in the city.
Ten years ago only about 20 families lived in the city’s Orthodox Jewish enclave, centered in the Overlook, Avalon and Blue Ridge Estates areas. Thanks to promotional efforts like a website called “Waterbury Jewish Life” that extols the city’s affordable homes and vibrant community, more than 350 Orthodox families now live there, said Yudkin, who runs the website as part of his real estate business.
Yudkin, who moved to Waterbury 15 years ago after buying property in the
city, also sees more investors from out of state buying homes as rent increases make their investments profitable. As prices continue to rise, buying and selling is also happening at an accelerated pace.
As a small dog watched from a window, Yudkin stood outside a triple-decker house at the northern edge of the WOW neighborhood at 152 East Farm St. and told its story.
Now painted a striking shade of sea green, the house was priced at $9,500 when one of Yudkin’s Waterbury-based clients bought it in 2015 and undertook renovations. That person sold it in August 2023 for $270,000, and then the new owner sold it for $365,000 on Dec. 15, 2023.
As of Thursday, according to Zillow, the value of the East Farm Street house had risen to $382,800.
Rents stress longtime residents
Although the hot market is great for sellers and investors, tenants and longtime homeowners across Waterbury are suffering as both rents and taxes skyrocket to new highs in the modern era.
“A lot of people are struggling with higher rent increases … their rent, some of them doubled,” Weaver said. “With electricity, gas and everything else that they have to do, they’re not doing well.”
Weaver has joined the city’s new Fair Rent Commission, which is reviewing complaints of excessive rent hikes and poor maintenance. Existing rent assistance programs can’t do enough to help people who have seen their living costs balloon, she added. Rent in once affordable Connecticut cities like Hartford has also risen dramatically since the pandemic, giving stressed tenants few options.
“Some people are just leaving their houses,” Weaver said. “The problem is that there’s really no place for them to go” that’s affordable.
On the tax front, Waterbury joined Boston and other cities this year in facing the need to redistribute the burden of paying for city services from a weak commercial real estate sector to a booming residential sector. More cops and teachers are needed in the growing city and the budget has already been cut to the bone, city officials say.
In a recent video chat sponsored by the Republican-American newspaper, Mayor Pernerewski said that the surge in home valuations, combined with the state’s second-highest mill rate at 54.19, was stressing homeowners already struggling with years of tax hikes.
“Because the assessments went up so high, there’s still going to be a tax increase this year,” Pernerewski said, adding that the average Waterbury homeowner would pay about $200 more.
Like the taxpayers of its New Haven County neighbor Hamden, Waterbury residents also carry the extra burden of having to pay for pension-funding mistakes made by prior administrations.
“We continue to work on growing the grand list to try to be able to offset those numbers,” Pernerewski said.
Yudkin said the skyrocketing home values and higher taxes are cooling the Waterbury real estate market a bit, and he’s started a drain-cleaning company to diversify his business. But he’s still banking on growth in the Brass City.
“It’s still moving … prices are higher than ever,” Yudkin said. “So who knows when it’s gonna stop.”