It’s Bridgeport Day at the State Capitol as the legislative session winds down with a lot on the line concerning education, equity and financial flow to Connecticut’s most populous community.
It’s a day to lobby Bridgeport’s future to the legislative decision makers that hold the keys to the financial vault in a state accumulating massive surpluses.
One of the arguments that Bridgeport advocates will highlight is the poverty smack up against affluence in cozy Fairfield County. Bridgeport is just minutes from some of the swankiest estates in the country, a point highlighted by Hearst Media reporter Alex Putterman.
By the same measure, the Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk metro area ranked as the fifth most unequal of any metro area nationally, with the top 1% earning more than $6.2 million a year, 62 times what the bottom 99% earned. Among all counties, Fairfield County ranked 12th more unequal nationally by this metric, while Litchfield, New Haven and Hartford Counties also ranked in the top quintile.
“You have Greenwich and New Canaan physically quite close to Bridgeport,” said Connecticut Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, a New Haven Democrat who has made inequality a focus of his decades-long legislative tenure. “Whereas they might as well be on a different planet economically.”
And because race and socioeconomic status are often closely intertwined, Connecticut also ranks among the states with the largest racial wealth and income gaps, with annual earnings 57% higher for white people than for Black people and 75% higher for white people than for Hispanic people.
Full story here
