The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
The threat of a stagnant population
Whenever Connecticut population data is released, two points are reinforced — we’re not growing and we’re getting older. Numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau are the latest support for those two points, and as usual, they represent a threat to the state’s long-term viability.
You can’t grow your economy without growing the population. And as people get older and age out of the labor force, they require more care, which requires more money and more workers to supply that support. Connecticut is falling short on all those counts.
To the surprise of very few observers, Fairfield County is the only part of the state that has shown significant population growth over the past decade-plus. The population there is up 5.6 percent since 2010, whereas the rest of the state is about even or declining in population. Fairfield County is also home to some of the most exclusive addresses on the Eastern Seaboard, and demand is high across the region. What is lacking is supply.
Connecticut’s stagnant population isn’t an issue of the state driving people away or taxing people to South Carolina. There is a desire to live here, as shown by extraordinarily high housing prices and exceedingly low supply. We also have many unfilled jobs in the state, which remain open because employers have a hard time finding people.
What we’re doing as a state is keeping the gates locked, and it’s hurting everyone. The issue is zoning, and it is strangling our economic future.
Connecticut needs more housing, and if it was built our population would rise significantly, with an accompanying boom in economic growth. More people would mean more services required
Towns like to brag about local control, but what that means in practice is that their neighborhoods are frozen in amber, with no hope for meeting the changing demands of a dynamic population.
to serve those people, which means more jobs to provide those services, and on and on in a virtuous circle of growth. If you cut off that growth engine by denying the ability to build more housing, you get stagnation and eventual decay.
That’s the path we’re on today. The only way out of this completely self-created mess is through action at the state level. Towns like to brag about local control, but what that means in practice is that their neighborhoods
are frozen in amber, with no hope for meeting the changing demands of a dynamic population. Offering incentives isn’t going to help, as experience has shown over and over again. Reform requires a mandate from the state.
Too many in state government, however, are stuck in the same thinking that has led us down this path. They don’t want to change anything. They want someone else to handle it. Maybe the cities can take on the entire task of population growth — that seems to be the prevailing thinking. It’s a bad idea for all kinds of reasons, not least of which that growth benefits everyone.
This is the biggest long-term challenge facing the state. Our population is getting older and smaller. Our economy is suffering for it. And the solution, right in front of our eyes, is simple — we need to build more housing, and we need to loosen regulations to allow that to happen.
Time is ticking on the legislative session. Lawmakers need to take this seriously.