Check out this piece in Bloomberg Businessweek, Connecticut’s Ribbon of Hardship. For a city like Bridgeport the Steelpointe Harbor development cannot happen soon enough.
The Connecticut portion of Interstate 95 was dubbed the “ribbon of hope” by state planners for its promise of prosperity when it was built in the 1950s. It’s still an apt nickname for those living in the hedge fund hubs along it: Greenwich and Westport.
In Bridgeport, 35 minutes northeast of Greenwich, and where Lazarus attends community college, I-95 is more like a ribbon of hardship. Officials in this onetime industrial capital turned poorest city in the region have been aggressively courting private developers and spending millions in public funds to clean up brownfields and revitalize the downtown. Even so, driving along Barnum Avenue, named after Bridgeport’s famous son, circus promoter P.T. Barnum, it’s difficult to imagine how different it must have felt 50 years ago, when block after block of factories buzzed with workers. At its peak in the 1930s, the city was home to some 500 plants; big employers included General Electric (GE), Singer and Remington Arms. The artery now connects two of the roughest neighborhoods, the mostly black East End and the mostly Hispanic East Side, its factories reduced to structural skeletons beset by graffiti and squatters.
The Bridgeport metro area consists of 24 towns in Fairfield County in the state’s southwestern corner, including small, prosperous hamlets like Darien and New Canaan, and bleak pockets of poverty in Stratford and Norwalk. It’s home to nearly 1 million people. If the region were a country, it’d be the world’s 12th-most unequal, ranking just below Guatemala. Economists measure income disparity using the Gini coefficient: A measure of 0 means all money is evenly distributed; 1 means one person has it all. The U.S. had a Gini of .467 in 2010, up 2 percent since 2000, census data show. (With the exception of Chile and Mexico, it has the highest level of disparity of the 34 countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.) The Bridgeport region’s Gini grew 17 percent during this time, to .537, making this 625-square-mile swath home to the biggest income divide of any metropolitan area in the U.S.
To get behind those numbers, one need only take a 10-minute drive south on I-95 from Stamford to Greenwich. Squeals of excitement from a dozen prepubescent girls reverberate throughout a white van making the trip to where houses are bigger and the grass literally greener. It’s school vacation week and Lazarus’s daughter Ahhsha gazes out the window as they pass exits for Old Greenwich and Cos Cob.
“Greenwich looks very different,” says Ahhsha, a rail-thin girl with five perfect fresh braids tracing her scalp. “They have more sun than us, more windows on the houses, more beautiful houses.”
Ahhsha and her friends spill into the bright yellow locker room of the Boys & Girls Club of Greenwich, where they wriggle into pint-size bathing suits. With looks of terrified delight, one by one they jump into the pool. Many are learning to swim for the first time.
This club, two blocks from a Lexus dealership, is a stark contrast to the Boys & Girls Club of Stamford, where Ahhsha usually plays and which borders a housing project. “It’s more better, not near alleys where cats have no homes,” Ahhsha says of her current surroundings. “There’s not men committing crimes. It’s safer. I’m thinking of moving one day.”
The region’s diversity is a mixed bag for Lazarus and her kids. Their neighborhood and public schools in Stamford are better than where they used to live in the Bronx, but rents are higher, and with fewer buses and no subway system they need a car. Opportunities like going to Greenwich to swim or watch a billionaire’s personal fireworks display broaden Ahhsha’s and Gerahmee’s worlds, and Lazarus hopes they’ll be motivated to work tirelessly toward achieving that life.
At the same time, the gulf between the towns is a constant weight. As dozens of residents from the area repeatedly relayed in interviews, living among such excesses can make bridging the gap feel impossible. “We’re in an area where there are pockets of extreme wealth and pockets of extreme poverty, and they’re butting up against one another,” says Carla Miklos, a former investment banker who runs a food pantry and homeless shelter in nearby Fairfield. “The low-wage jobs are not enough to get by, and the high-paying jobs are not available to poor people.” Barbara Edinberg, a 63-year-old Fairfield resident, works at the Bridgeport Child Advocacy Coalition, which aims to reduce the state’s achievement gap between poor and rich students, the worst in the country. In the Bridgeport of her childhood (the ’50s), factory work at manufacturers like General Electric propelled her parents’ generation toward middle-income stability. “You could get a job right out of high school in those plants and earn a decent wage and make enough money to move to the suburbs,” she says. “Those opportunities don’t exist anymore.”
The Bridgeport metro area is a harbinger for where the U.S. may be heading, warns A. Fiona Pearson, a sociology professor at Central Connecticut State University. “You see manufacturing jobs leaving. The jobs coming in are service jobs, and the rise in the financial sector—with firms relocating from Manhattan—helps contribute to growing income inequality,” she says. The area’s history of institutional corruption and ineffectual management has only added to its problems. “When difficult decisions need to be made,” Pearson says, “the already diminishing resources for individuals at the bottom are the first to go.”
The idea that people like Lazarus can rise above their parents’ economic status and that their children will do the same is an article of faith for most Americans. After a decade of research, however, the University of Ottawa’s Corak concludes that upward mobility from the bottom is more folklore than reality—and that in a world of ever-growing inequality this may be increasingly true. Building upon the work of a dozen economists, Corak plotted intergenerational earnings elasticity—how mobility is passed from one generation to the next—against the Gini coefficient measure for 22 countries. The data form an upward slope, indicating a positive relationship worldwide between the degree of disparity and the extent to which poverty or wealth is passed on through generations. (A flat line would imply that countries with different levels of inequality have the same degree of mobility.) “The United States is among the most unequal of the rich countries and it is also among the least mobile. The strong tie between family background and the chance of success runs counter to what we commonly understand as the American Dream,” Corak says.
Corak is quick to point out that his findings reflect association, not necessarily causation. Suddenly giving poor Americans truckloads of money wouldn’t make it like Denmark, positioned opposite the U.S. and near the base of the slope where inequality is least and mobility highest. Mobility, he says, is based on the interaction of three main forces: families (the degree to which they transmit advantages, both material and nonmaterial), the labor market (the availability of secure jobs for people of all skill levels and the premium placed on education), and public policy (how level the playing field is, especially for the disadvantaged).
What the Great Gatsby Curve illustrates is that where Lazarus and her kids ultimately end up on the income spectrum will be more a reflection of their family background and not of their talents. “The most important thing that the U.S. is leaving behind as it moves up the curve is the vision of itself,” Corak says. “It’s not just poverty of money that matters but also poverty of experience and expectation.”
Alan Krueger, a labor economist who chairs President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, used Corak’s data in a January speech to extrapolate that mobility would further diminish for the next generation. “Children of wealthy parents already have much more access to opportunities to succeed than children of poor families,” he said. “This is likely to be increasingly the case in the future unless we take steps to ensure that all children have access to quality education, health care, a safe environment, and other opportunities that are necessary to have a fair shot at economic success.”
Full story: www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-07-05/connecticuts-ribbon-of-hardship
Urban areas will always be poverty centers. The surrounding communities work hard at keep cities down. One example is their affordable housing policies. How does a working class family afford a home in say Fairfield when the affordable housing price is in the area of $300k?
The towns and their political leaders make sure all the social ills in the entire area are handled by the cities. We take care of their poor elderly, their sick, their addictive people, their troubled veterans; you name it the cities take care of it all within tax-exempt properties. Sure they give us money under the PILOT program; big deal, it’s not sufficient.
When it comes to education we get a large dollar amount but you know what, the affluent communities get money they really don’t need.
This is where our state delegation has failed us miserably and who suffers the most? Our kids suffer the most because they have two strikes against them before they enter school.
Bridgeport will always be a poor town with pockets of affluence. We have politicians who will not make the hard choices and who play with our tax money. How do our kids stand a chance when the city has flatlined the education budget for the past two years?