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Editorial: Gap of Shame
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Business New Haven
11/24/2003
By: BNH
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We've long known that our state features a yawning gulf between its richest and poorest residents - the nation's wealthiest state is home to three of the country's poorest cities.
But a new analysis of figures from the 2000 census places this disparity in a new light.
This gap was calculated by the Associated Press using Census data to come up with a "Gini Index" - a number between zero and one. The closer the number is to zero, the more even the income distribution. The closer to one, the greater the gap. According to the AP, Connecticut's overall Gini of .471 is the highest in New England.
The gulf between Connecticut's wealthiest and poorest is most apparent in two kinds of communities. In the small hill towns of Litchfield County, the disparity between wealthy families in country houses and the people who run the area's service economy.
Likewise, cities such as New Haven have very large populations of poor people living in close proximity to some very well-off families. In the Elm City one needs only to traverse the length of Huntington Street from the grand homes near Whitney Avenue to the distressed multi-family houses as the same street winds down into Newhallville.
Many economists assert that large incomes gaps damage society and make it more difficult for the poor to secure adequate housing, education, health care and other essentials.
"Greater income disparity leads to a greater stratification in our society," University of Connecticut researcher Stanley McMillan told the New Haven Register. "It's a bad thing, in my estimation, because those costs we ultimately all pay for."
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