As usual, Bridgeport left to fend for itself

11/04/07
Forget about neighbors. Listening to contenders for local office come through for endorsement interviews the past several weeks, it’s hard to believe some of these communities are on the same planet.
Candidates talk about what’s making news in their towns, and it’s striking how priorities differ. Some are concerned about maintaining the Colonial charm downtown, or fighting overdevelopment. Traffic is always a problem. In one town, the local outrage is all about height and bulk restrictions on million-dollar homes.
In these suburbs, it all comes down to taxes. The services are there, but no one wants to pay for them, so candidates argue about who can do more for less. There were a dozen variations on the “I’ll make government work smarter” theme from various challengers (as well as the unfortunate promises to “think outside the box”).
Then there’s Bridgeport. With a recent report saying its high schools function as “dropout factories” and a childhood poverty rate more than twice the state average, Bridgeport’s mayoral hopefuls would give anything to have the problems of the suburbs. Instead of maintaining old-time charm, leaders here are trying to build an entirely new city.
Bridgeport for decades has absorbed the problems from its neighbors, leaving the outlying towns to fight over zoning minutiae and traffic signals. No, it’s not minutiae to the people whose houses and streets are affected, but for the wider population, it’s hard to get worked up about.
The candidate interviews give lie to the idea that any sort of regional planning is ever coming here. The idea behind that goal goes to the question of why Connecticut’s cities, so often surrounded by wealth, can struggle as much as they do. Why are Hartford and Waterbury and Bridgeport in so much trouble if their suburbs are sailing along unscathed?
The answer is that those cities could be doing just fine if they and their five or seven closest neighbors were under one government. If Bridgeport annexed, say, Fairfield, Trumbull, Shelton, Stratford and Easton, there would be dramatically more wealth to work with to solve the inner city’s problems, and significantly more resources to dilute the negative effects of the post-industrial economy.
Instead, every town and city is stuck playing essentially a zero-sum game, where what’s good for one is often to the detriment of a neighbor. If wealthy families or businesses leave Bridgeport for Fairfield, it’s not a two-way street in terms of benefits.
But regional planning need not involve some sort of supercity swallowing its richer neighbors. Just increasing the ability of well-off towns to help poorer neighbors, and efforts to evenly distribute problems among the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy, would pay huge dividends for the cities.
The problems is that it’s not in the interests of suburban voters. It’s not that Fairfield and Trumbull don’t care about Bridgeport; leaders there rightly recognize that what happens to the region’s largest city affects everyone. But they’re not willing to risk what their towns have built up. To surrender autonomy or tax dollars in a possibly fruitless attempt to help a neighbor in need would be to guarantee a potent election-year issue for any challenger.
It’s the same reason why cities get short shrift in the Capitol. It’s a suburban-dominated state, so suburban issues take precedence in the Legislature. The cities get what’s left over or worse, especially if their delegations can’t get their acts together.
So Bridgeport is left to fend for itself. It’s little wonder the city has to take what it can get when developers come calling.
There’s plenty of talk about how Bridgeport has turned the corner, and how all these new apartments and development deals will finally lift the city to its former glory. Maybe they will. But whoever wins Tuesday’s mayoral election ought to know full well what he’s getting into. It’s going to take a lot more than tweaking the zoning regulations to get Bridgeport where it wants to go.
Maybe in a decade or so, the city will be lucky enough to have candidates who can vow to fight overdevelopment. Then Bridgeport and its neighbors will finally feel like they’re in the same boat together.

Hugh S. Bailey is assistant editorial page editor at the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6233 or via e-mail at hbailey@ctpost.com.