The easy way to get real population growth in 10 years

Gov. Ned Lamont wasn’t having it. The state’s paltry growth rate over the past 10 years is not going to be repeated on his watch. “We are going to do a lot better in the next decade, I can tell you that,” he said on Monday.

Lamont was reacting to recently released census data that showed Connecticut had some of the lowest population growth in the nation over the past 10 years, increasing barely 1 percent from 2010. The national average was 7 percent, and New England as a whole managed 4 percent growth.

At least we’re not West Virginia, which lost 3.2 percent of its people along with a congressional seat.

For Lamont to make good on that promise, people will need places to live. To date, the governor’s policies don’t support reaching those goals.

Luckily for him, the population news wasn’t all bad. Following a year of stories about city dwellers and their COVID-driven flights to Connecticut, the big winner locally turned out to be, of all things, the Torrington Metropolitan Area.

You could be forgiven for not knowing such a thing existed. The city on the Naugatuck River only has about 34,000 people, hardly a bustling metropolis.

This is no knock against Torrington. I was born there and spent years as a child in neighboring Harwinton, where Torrington was the closest thing we had to a city. As the largest community in Litchfield County it earns the designation for the entire area, which includes the state’s northwest corner.

Of 926 metro areas nationwide, Torrington’s had the third-largest positive change in net migration from 2019 to 2020, with a 4.4 percentage point shift, according to the New York Times. New York City, meanwhile, was among the 10 biggest losers of population.

Percentages only tell us so much. The Litchfield County towns with the biggest gains were places like Salisbury, which went from a 4 percent decline in movers in 2019 to a 28 percent gain. When your baseline is a town with fewer than 4,000 residents, it doesn’t make for a meaningful comparison with New York City. Still, the state will take good news where it can find some.

The question becomes whether we could build on whatever Litchfield County is doing.

Republicans say Connecticut’s problem is high taxes, but that’s their go-to response for everything. It’s true Democratic-leaning New York and California lost out in congressional redistricting, but both had healthy population growth over the full decade. And no one thinks West Virginia’s problem is high taxes.

A good start in Connecticut would be to make it a more interesting place to live. Our towns are staid, and many of them actively work to keep people out through exclusionary zoning. This session’s push for land-use reform has been based on a number of rationales, including desegregation and affordability. Just as important is a need to give our towns a little life. Apartments built atop stores on a main street should be the norm in every town, but some communities actively ban them.

Beyond that, we need to simply give people a place to live. A stagnant population doesn’t necessarily mean people don’t want to live there. It could just as easily mean no one can find places they can afford. Since newly built apartments in Connecticut fill up quickly, there’s good reason to think that’s our problem.

Will the population growth in Litchfield County continue? It’s unlikely without building more housing, which local governments too often put up barriers against. The only reason it was possible in the past year is because most of those towns had seen a steady population decline dating back years. Without more housing, their growth will soon top out.

To achieve the numbers the governor wants to see, we need to be more welcoming. Economic growth and population growth are closely linked. To date, though, Lamont has said he favors carrots over sticks when it comes to pushing local communities on housing reform.

That won’t work. Connecticut is near the bottom nationally in new housing units per capita. Left up to the towns, it will stay that way. That’s why state action is necessary.