A big city to call our own

Connecticut can’t get a Boston of its own, but we could maybe get a Cambridge. Is Cambridge without a Boston better than we already have? Not really.

Connecticut was left reeling a bit last week when United Technologies said it was moving its headquarters out of the state and into, where else, the Boston area. It’s bad enough this state has to settle for New York and Boston scraps in our professional sports fanhood, but now we’re losing our big companies to them, too.

The administration in Hartford knows this is a major problem, and that barring a return to the “Bronx is Burning” days that had corporations fleeing to the suburbs, we will keep losing out to big cities. The question is how to compete.

According to the state of Connecticut’s projections, New Haven’s population will reach about 144,000 in 2040, up from about 130,000 today. That’s more than a 10 percent increase, which is great compared to the statewide projected growth of around 2 percent. It’s not so great compared with the 100 percent growth the state’s top economic adviser says he wants to achieve to stay competitive.

“We’re never going to create our own Boston, but Connecticut needs to create a city that can compete in our own way, in a Connecticut way,” David Lehman, Gov. Ned Lamont’s top economic adviser, told Hearst Connecticut Media’s Dan Haar. “New Haven needs to compete with Cambridge and we need to do it head-on,” adding that he envisions doubling the New Haven population in 20 years or less.

Sure, why not. Cambridge has Harvard, New Haven has Yale, and the populations are roughly similar. But it leaves out something major. Suppose New Haven does compete directly with Cambridge. Who is our Boston supposed to be? Hamden?

There’s not much point in taking Lehman to task over a throwaway line, especially when there are many better things to take him to task about. But the larger point is worth considering, since most people with an opinion on the matter agree that Connecticut’s lack of big cities is holding us back on an economic development scale. So how do we get one? Despite our slow growth, our problem isn’t a lack of people. Our cities are small but the state is not, with a population in the middle of the pack nationally.

But all those people are famously split up into 169 jurisdictions, and no two of those are likely to have aligning interests, at least in the minds of decision makers. While places like New Haven and Stamford are growing healthily, most towns in Connecticut face declining populations that are if anything leaving towns even more fearful of combining services with their neighbors and losing some measure of control. Witness the Lamont school regionalization flameout of 2019.

Cities build apartments all the time. In the suburbs, the word “apartment” is synonymous with low-income housing, and enough to generate protests about things like “neighborhood character.”

To create a city to compete with Boston would require combining under one jurisdiction the populations of dozens of towns and cities. In another era, cities would gobble up their neighbors with impunity. Houston proper is 669 square miles; New Haven is 20.

So we’ll just start with New Haven in the middle and work our way out until we get to 669 and call it a city. Surely the suburbs that lost it over the idea of sharing backoffice school functions would go along if it’s sold in the name of our economic future.

All we have is a few hundred years of Land of Steady Habits tendencies standing in our way.