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Back to the Land
The question for Connecticut: What happens when cities, suburbs, small towns and rural areas
undergo dramatic population shifts?
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Business New Haven
7/9/2001
By:
Susan Cornell
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Numbers here. Numbers there. Moving targets. The folks at the U.S. Bureau of the Census have tallied the counters, and here is the reality: Since 1990, Connecticut has transitioned from a state of crowded cities and rural stretches to super-suburbia.
The biggest gainers in the population game are communities in close proximity to the metropolitan areas as well as rural towns in the Connecticut River Valley and eastern Connecticut. Areas losing population the fastest over the past decade include the state's large cities with the exception of Stamford and many of the densely populated 'burbs and small cities. Connecticut is part of a trend America's demographers have observed since the 1970s: Small-town living is big.
New Haven experienced a 5.2-percent loss in population, at the same time becoming the second-most populous Connecticut city (after Bridgeport, with a population of 139,529), overtaking Hartford which lost an astonishing 13 percent of its residents. The population of New Haven County, however, grew by 2.5 percent, making it the state's third-largest. Middlesex County grew at the fastest pace, with a ten-year population hike of more than eight percent.
The New Haven County municipalities of Southbury, Madison, Woodbridge and Oxford, in order, posted the largest increases in population, with growth rates of 17.4, 15.3, 13.4 and 13.1 percent, respectively. At the same time cities such as West Haven, Meriden and Waterbury posted population declines.
Most of Connecticut's fastest-growing towns were communities of less than 10,000 people. East Haddam, Killingworth, Scotland and Sterling each grew by more than 24 percent, while the affluent Fairfield County hamlet of Sherman topped the list with a population hike in excess of 36 percent.
What happens when these once-rural towns rapidly suburbanize? Virtually everything changes - from the town's reputation and flavor (and relative anonymity) to economics - from business booms to new educational burdens.
Small Towns: Newcomers, New Issues
Look at the multiple impacts on one town - Killingworth - which has exploded from its 1950 count of 677 residents to a 2000 total of more than 6,000. While this former "hicksville" is only one of several small towns in state experiencing enormous growth, Killingworth is exemplary of what other small towns brave: There are similar upsides and downsides and comparable issues as population numbers swell.
Killingworth is a bedroom community within commuting distance of New Haven, Middletown, Hartford and New London. Newcomers include white-collar workers from the insurance and computer industries as well as doctors and attorneys. Hence, money is flowing into the formerly rural and rustic combination of farmland and forest.
As with many small communities, the newcomers seek more bang for their real estate buck - bigger homes and more land for less money - and less crime. Former Fairfield County residents are major contributors to the population boom. Affluent newcomers are buying pseudo-historic houses with "bonus rooms," designer log cabins and "starter castles," as some residents derisively call them.
Accordingly, the town has had to add roads and build a new library. A modular addition to the town hall is planned and the issue of educating its littlest residents is red-hot. Says First Selectman David LeVasseur, "No degree of planning can put us on the upside of the curve."
Such small towns are growing by leaps and bounds - and subdivisions. In Killingworth, the subdiv proliferation is putting a serious strain on a well-regarded school system. Subdivisions go hand in hand with more younger students, as each of the new abodes averages about 1.5 school-aged children. With an average cost of educating a Killingworth student set at $9,000 per year, the totals add up quickly.
Explains Bruce Dodson, president of the town's Land Conservation Trust: "One subdivision presently before Planning & Zoning would create an additional 68 homes. The 102 students [based on the average] would increase our school budget by over one $1 million per year."
The town is also presently grappling with the issue of where to situate students physically: Another school addition or a new school? The recent referendum to appropriate $57 million for a new school was defeated - now what? The same expand-or-build questions have been faced in Durham, Middlefield, Old Saybrook, Portland and Essex recently.
"The impact has been astronomical," says LeVasseur. "The average house brings in $3,000 to $4,000 in [annual] taxes, yet it costs roughly $9,000 to $10,000 for each child in the school system. By the second child, we're already $16,000 behind."
This has an impact on the mill rate, and "There are traditionally only two ways to deal with the impact," LeVasseur says. The first, he explains, "is through commercial development. Or you can stem the demand for services. We've opted for the latter."
He explains that growing Killingworth's commercial base "would transform the community to something we wouldn't want to live in." Thus, the town has attacked the problem from the expenditure side and by aggressively preserving open space. Over the past three years, three and a half square miles (ten percent of the town's total land area) have been added to the open-space rolls.
From the developer's perspective, however, the open space campaign is no panacea. Says Renee Smith, who with her husband operates Cornerstone Construction in town: "I am in favor of the town buying open space, but are we being charged as a town a lot more? We're paying more for a piece of land than what the market would warrant."
"Land development is more expensive," she adds. "There aren't cheap lots available and there's strong demand in the market. So, there's no possibility of building a middle-market or low-end home which has a downside in terms of the mix of people."
Smith disputes the 1.5-children-per-household statistic. Instead, she finds that with the number of pricey homes going in, many newcomers are either much older or retired. Many are empty-nesters or have the money to send their children to private schools, Smith asserts.
Of his town's growth, LeVasseur says, "I would be happy with diversity but growth is so rapid that there is no sense of community for personal relationships." The demand for municipal services, he adds, will only continue to grow. People know that they can get a lot of house for the money here and the taxes aren't that unreasonable.
At the same time, "They want the services they used to have," LeVasseur says. Also, "The amount of commercial development needed to make a significant difference would be 50 to 100 Pharmedicas [a company that recently relocated to Killingworth from New Haven]. We're too far behind the eight ball."
Mike Bugbee, a builder and contractor in Killingworth, says that the former no-man's-land has become increasingly desirable to residents from Clinton, Deep River and even moneyed Madison. Given a choice, Bugbee would rather see the town grow with pricey homes than adding commercial properties.
"At least with expensive homes, we can grow the tax base enough to pay for schools, etc. without changing the town too much," he says. "We have the room. And people can still get to Rt. 1 to shop."
Smith agrees. "The nice thing is that Killingworth has a huge amount of space dedicated to open space in some way," she says. 'We should be concerned more with the town [becoming] a pass-through with the development of Clinton Crossing and the amount of traffic."
It's not just Killingworth, of course. Says Wini Olson of Essex, a planner with the Connecticut River Estuary Regional Planning Agency (RPA), 'We're in danger of being destroyed by our own attractiveness. If people find you attractive and if you build it, they will come. And towns will change."
Her employer, the RPA, "helps towns to manage change as best they can and to try to help them look at the problems and devise ways to let change happen without destroying the community," Olson explains. This is at once an "impossible dream and a balancing act. We're just a resource to share what someone else has tried that did or didn't work."
Plus, there's balancing agendas. The hottest issue in Killingworth last autumn was the possible acquisition of the state's sole surviving cranberry bog. The 100-year-old bog sits on 19.5 acres that are home to "some of the rarest plants in our state," according to John Himmelman, vice president of the Land Trust. The trust is able to maintain the habitat in the public trust; a private buyer would have been under no obligation to offer protection of endangered plants or maintain the property as a bog. The land was acquired in January by the Land Trust after members raised more than $100,000 to purchase and maintain the acreage.
But, were those who contributed to the acquisition of this one-of-a-kind property newbies to town? Said Dodson in a letter to residents: "It is disturbing that new residents on new roads move here to enjoy the rural nature of Killingworth, but have not been supporting our efforts to preserve open space. Of over 300 people who contributed to the purchase of the cranberry bog, only two live on new roads, and only a handful of new-road residents are members of the Land Trust."
"Some of us old timers are getting tired," Dodson continued. "We"re proud to have helped maintain a town we all want to call home. Many of us are willing to make sacrifices to keep our land open by donating land or conservation easements in the interest of preserving open space. But we can't do it all."
Spaced Out in 28 Towns
In May, municipal leaders from across the state gathered at Killingworth Town Hall as the state's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) announced $8.3 million in funding to purchase 40 properties statewide. Twenty-eight municipalities received checks to help ensure that 1,564 acres would be designated as open space and protected from development. It was the largest round of awards ever in the Open Space & Watershed Acquisition Grant program.
The 28 grant recipients included, locally:
- Guilford: $117,000 for the 21.45-acre Betts property and $200,000 for the 97-acre Braemore property.
- Killingworth: $180,000 for 80.6 acres in the 133-acre Bosco property; $271,292 for the 128.8-acre Jaycox property, and $25,000 for the Pond Meadow Natural Area.
- Madison: $279,000 for the 69.7-acre Neck River corridor.
- North Haven: $462,500 for the 23.72-acre Heritage Lane parcel.
- Old Saybrook: $135,000 for a 0.94-acre parcel on the Connecticut River.
- Westbrook: $72,000 for the 24-acre King property.
New Haven vs. Hartford: A Tale of Two Cities
Connecticut's largest cities have steadily declined in both jobs and population for a half-century. Hartford's population was 162,200 in 1960. The capital city's largest population decline occurred during the 1970s (although the Insurance City experienced a slight expansion in the 1980s). By 1998, the bottom had fallen out of Hartford's population base. Jobs grew between 1963 and 1990, and then declined during the '90s.
Like Hartford, New Haven's high water mark in population was posted during the 1960s, but then declined steadily through the '70s. Population rebounded in the '80s but then tanked in the most recent decade. Employment, which peaked in 1970, followed a similar pattern.
Hartford lost 11.5 of its job force between 1992 and 1997. But the latter year, according to IRS data, over more than 26 percent of the city's taxpayers qualified as "working poor." By contrast, in the late 1990s New Haven experienced steady employment growth. Hartford is home to nearly three times the number of "working poor" than the region at large, while New Haven's jobless rate fell from 6.8 percent in 1996 to 3.9 percent in 1999 - the lowest in a decade.
According to the state's Department of Labor (DOL), fastest-growing New Haven industries between July 1999 and July 2000 were: federal government (up 17.9 percent, in large part a consequence of opening a new FBI facility on State Street); electronic equipment manufacturing (5.8 percent); chemical and allied goods manufacturing (3.6 percent); state and local government (1.5 percent) and wholesale trade (1.5%).
The Connecticut Economic Digest, a publication of the state's Department of Economic & Community Development and the DOL, asserts that the Elm City's future has brightened in terms of job gains, entrepreneurship (notably in high-tech industries) and quality of life. Wages have swelled as have new housing permits and retail sales by New Haven businesses.
Says City Planner Karen Gilvarg of New Haven's population decline, "New Haven probably lost as much as 10,000 in population in the mid-190s but since has been rebounding."
One neighborhood reflecting that rebound is downtown. "New Haven has more downtown area residents than Hartford or Bridgeport," says Gilvarg. "That's the unusual thing about New Haven." That includes an increase in the non-student resident population, "something we are consciously building on and will continue to consciously build on."
The other principal growth area is the city's northeast corner, north of Route 80. Gilvarg cites in part Mayor John DeStefano's 1997 Livable City Initiative (LCI). In 1996, she says, there were some 1,000 abandoned buildings in the city. That figure has been halved due to a combination of demolition and rehabilitation. The real question, says Gilvarg, is how to increase home ownership?
Players in the Elm City improvement game include Neighborhood Housing Services and Habitat for Humanity, both of which are branches of national programs. There is also LCI, which conducts home-ownership seminars, Empower New Haven and the Hill Development Corp. which recently "did a project with tax-credit units and is looking to do more," Gilvarg says. Additionally, in areas "too blighted and troublesome to revamp, community open spaces and gardens" are being created. "We are trying to turn lemons into lemonade," she says.
Though both cities have experienced similar labor-market conditions, Hartford's employment base is today less robust than New Haven's. Though unemployment rates for both have dropped, Hartford's is more than a full percentage point higher than New Haven's. The common thread between the two, however, is Connecticut's transition from a state of cities and countryside to a suburban state. Assuming this trend is here to stay, both cities will face similar revenue-raising challenges as well as employment and education challenges.
The "Sprawl' Brawl
A group of activists carried gasoline-filled plastic jugs onto an exclusive subdivision being built on one of eastern Long Island's last farms. Spray-painted slogans included "Stop Urban Sprawl," "ELF" and "If You Build It, We Will Burn It." ELF stands for the Earth Liberation Front, an extremist environmental protest group that has torched and vandalized various targets deemed to be environmental threats to the environment.
At a January planning workshop sponsored by the Route 1 West Planning Committee in Guilford, residents sent a clear message to town officials: Urban sprawl is unwelcome. The residents evinced a general consensus on several key issues: A New England feel, maintenance of wooded areas and stoplight-free traffic flow were significant. Although this was a more civil gathering and the tactics differed greatly from ELF's, the issue is the same: sprawl.
What, though, is sprawl? It means entirely different things to different people. For some, sprawl is synonymous with growth; for others, sprawl is simply wasteful use of land.
Laurence D. Cohen, senior fellow at the Yankee Institute for Public Policy (and columnist for the Hartford Courant and BNH), points out that "There's another side - that sprawl's okay." Cohen says the idea behind the buzzword is "nothing really new. Since the early 1900s, as people gained financial resources, they moved."
Cohen's definition of sprawl is simply "The marketplace responding to what people want. To some, sprawl is a delightful move to the country - a way of saying 'Don't let the poor people get too close to me."'
Adds Cohen, "Some try to call it 'environmentalism,' but that is snobby with a dollop of racism mixed in." A plus for cities, Cohen adds, is that sprawl "frees up local housing for poor people" as wealthier residents move out.
Cohen says there are plenty of efficient ways to assure that an area is not developed too heavily; these include tax incentives, tax breaks and user fees. "The market is a lot smarter than the politicians," he says.
Then there's the "conspiracy theory that open space is a scheme to see the value of land increase in the middle to upper level suburbs," Cohen says. He cites the aforementioned $8.3 million in funding to buy open space, and expresses surprise that minority legislators have not made an issue of this funding.
As people move out of cities and into suburbs, the impacts on both can be tremendous. While New Haven's population between 1990 and 2000 declined by only 6,848 residents (5.2% percent), Hartford's exodus involved 18,161 residents (13 percent) - more than New Haven, Groton, New London and Bridgeport combined.
As people go, so goes the job base. As businesses move out, city tax bases shrink, leaving residents disproportionately poorer. Those left frequently face a triple blow: weak networks for job information, failing schools, disappearing jobs.
Says Bruce Katz, director of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.: "Hartford's decline is partly a reflection of state laws and practices that subsidize sprawl and permit suburbs to wall themselves off from regional responsibilities."
"A stronger Hartford - or Waterbury or New Britain or Bridgeport - will mean a stronger state and stronger regions," adds Katz. "There will be a lot less sprawl and a lot more energy and investment in places bypassed by the new economy."
Gov. John G. Rowland wants the state's Department of Transportation to work more closely with environmental protection and economic development agencies, says Rowland spokesman Dean Pagani. A transportation system that allows preservation of pristine land while still encouraging economic growth is the goal. Pagani adds that at the state government level, issues of overdevelopment, congestion and the open space debate are fusing.
The firewall to change is home rule: Land-development decisions are made by 169 autonomous towns and cities, and where power is subdivided even further between and among wetlands boards, planning boards, staff planners and selectmen. Further, what incentive do towns have to think regionally when they are financially reliant on local property taxes? Often, municipalities will seize opportunities for development without consideration of neighboring communities; if the strip mall in Town A puts the strip mall in Town B out of business, too bad.
However, University of Connecticut1s law professor Terry Tondro points out a development opportunity: land-use planning which is highly localized. Connecticut has 14 regional planning agencies with little authority. Some 20 years ago, when the feds dropped the requirement that regional planners review federal grant applications, the latter were stripped of effective power. Towns can even ignore the state's plan of conservation and development when local zoning regulations conflict with those plans. Connecticut municipalities, one might say, are autonymous- in large part, they can do as they please.
We sleep in Madison and travel through Guilford, Branford and East Haven to work, shop, or watch the Ravens in New Haven. We depend on a region for economic and recreational sustenance, but we have no regional government. Our only regional elected officials are members of Congress.
Tondro suggests that one possibility is regional revenue-sharing permissible under state law. Another step would be to encourage towns to consider the external impacts of land-use decisions.
Other strategies for "smart growth" include investing in downtowns, removing unrealistic permitting requirements so that businesses are drawn to cities, eliminating permitting requirements that encourage wasteful land use, accepting some strip development and guiding pedestrian-friendly activities into downtown areas.
Most development debate reveal two self-interested sides: Developers emphasize that their projects will generate property-tax dollars and jobs, while neighbors argue that the traffic and noise will be unbearable and the lights will obscure their view of the stars.
A Jetson-esque Answer
On the horizon is a joint UConn and NASA project to provide town officials with a powerful toll to glimpse into the future. Computer software and space technology are converging to provide local land-use officials the ability to ensure that future development projects are as site-friendly as possible. Through computer mapping and satellite imaging we may be able to see beneath the surface of the earth - and peer into the future.
UConn hopes that these digital tools will be in the hands of town officials within as little as a year. One example of how satellite imagery can help local planning boards make development decisions is by inspecting open space; scattered fragments of undeveloped land are less valuable to wildlife than contiguous areas of forest and field. Digital tools could assist planners in preserving contiguous forest lands.
Apply this to a town such as Old Saybrook. UConn scientists factored in zoning regulations to look at the Saybrook of the future -the fully "built-out" town. The computer map provided a sneak peek of watersheds, pavements and buildings that the future might bring. What the map projected was troubling (albeit enlightening) environmental future.
The happy ending to the story, however, is that Old Saybrook officials are rewriting road-building and subdivision regulations, drafting an open-space plan and updating the town's development and conservation plans. The small town, which has been battling to stay small, recently rejected applications by both Lowe's and Home Depot to build super-sized home improvement stores there.
Regional Planning Projects Under Way
"Smart Growth for the All-American Valley, " the Valley Regional Planning Agency's blueprint for the future of seven towns in the lower Naugatuck Valley, is being drafted and should be ready by early fall, according to Richard Eigan, the VRPA's executive director. The plan will serve as a guideline that will address an array of issues including transportation, water quality, utilities, fiscal issues and population to make the Valley a place "for smart growth," says consultant Glenn Chalder of the Avon consulting and planning firm Planimetrics, which was hired by the VRPA.
To the south, the Greater Bridgeport Regional Planning Agency (GBRPA) has found that the proposed container shipping facility in Bridgeport would reduce air pollution and traffic and would support the development of a wide variety of factories and warehouses, thus producing a range of new jobs for the city. Developing the harbor would reduce traffic congestion considered a potential impediment to development and future growth. The GBRPA reports that jobs could be created at manufacturing and service businesses in Bridgeport and surrounding towns.
Robert Santy, president of the New Haven-based Regional Growth Partnership, points out that "There is a regional plan of conservation and development for the first time since the 1960s."
Of critical importance is the issue of transportation and the effect transportation infrastructure has on the region, Santy says. Roughly $2 billion is being invested between the Quinnipiac River bridge, highway development projects and rail expenditures.
"Our ability to grow is affected because people from New York have a hard time getting here travelling through Stamford and Bridgeport,"Santy explains. "We have to get people out of single-occupancy vehicles and get some of the trucks off of I-95."
Santy emphasizes the importance of using feeder barges from New York and New Jersey to New Haven in order to reduce the number of trucks on the turnpike. Additionally, he says, there should be a "greater emphasis on rail: enhancements to the Shore Line East rail; equipment, marketing and ease of usage are all issues."Santy recommends that "a one-seat ride to work should be something we should spend money on."
Santy advises: "Towns need to look at what is allowed under zoning, both commercial and industrial. They should ask, How much will there be if its all built out? If that's not what you want, change the zoning. Look at the way-out-there scenarios."
As well, he says: "We don't have a strong state plan; it's advisory only. The state will see a much more public process and new policies in the future." Santy would like development to occur where there is already infrastructure and open-space protections in place. "If we had spent money years ago, there wouldn1t be open-space issues now."
Santy adds that municipalities for the first time ever are sharing tax revenues for bioscience investment. This model could also be applied to such projects as, for example, restoring a river. Since most rivers flow though multiple towns, they are by definition "regional." So, "We need a regional approach to how you manage that type of asset."
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