Spending Labor Day weekend in Hartford, Connecticut, is a spooky experience. Something is wrong. It’s not clear what or why.
It’s a gorgeous city in many ways, with everything one would want. It’s no wonder that it was the country’s great hotspot in the 1880s, even more valued and prestigious than New York City, which only became a wonder of the world with the advent of the commercial use of steel, and the bridges and skyscrapers it made possible.
In the city center, there is a large and luxurious park with a mighty stone entrance plus historic fountains and a pond.
The charm is overwhelming! There are plenty of places to live. Commercial space is ubiquitous and not very expensive. The parking on the weekends is free and spots are everywhere, right next to where you want to be.
What else could you ask for?
On Labor Day weekend, however, the carousel had hardly any customers. There were very few people out and about. There were no families on the great lawns having picnics. There were mostly loiterers here and there, with just a handful of people. The streets are largely empty. There are no street merchants or musicians performing in the streets. There is no one to give them money.
Something is keeping people away.
Hartford is on the list for a city death watch, along with San Francisco, Chicago, Rochester, Seattle, and others. As you might expect, crime is bad. It’s not obvious walking around at all. You never feel a direct threat but there is a feeling perhaps of being menaced here and there. You are rather relieved to be off the streets and in the cafe but you can’t help but worry about your car.
The most immediate explanation for the lack of life, then, is crime. But that might be an effect, not a cause. The other problem is of course education, which does not have a reputation for high quality in this town. In addition, the taxes are high.
But surely all of this can be fixed. Get a good mayor, a political consensus, pass some epic legislation, and you are done.
What in the heck is wrong? I’m a bit of a fundamentalist on such questions, and my immediate thought when looking at this city is that it desperately needs a huge and long-lasting tax holiday. As in everything: property taxes, business taxes, sales taxes, capital-gains taxes, and even income taxes. Why not turn the place into a little Hong Kong? That would seem to make sense.
Why isn’t it happening? This might even deal with the education problem. If enough businesses and residents move in, they could start new private schools and charter schools and seek to create an educational mecca here, outside the failing public schools.
Just to review: this city has fantastic infrastructure in every way. It has all the services you would ever want. The green space and monuments are strikingly great. I should add that the scale of the city—it is not large—is humane in a way that New York City, Houston, and Miami are not. One might suppose that some substantial tax and regulatory cuts, plus some better policing, would be enough to revive it and fully save it.
That’s my simple analysis. I called a friend to check his intuition about this, and he said exactly the same thing. It’s not rocket science. Why allow a treasure like this to sink into oblivion? Why would any civilized people allow that? Why not push some dramatic change?
“Once famous as the ‘insurance capital of the world,’ Hartford has been in decline for 30 years. In the 1990s, Hartford’s population hemorrhage made national news. Today it is smaller still, less than 70 percent of what it was in 1950. Hartford’s poverty rate is one of the highest in the nation. The city is falling apart.”
“The city spends more than $400 million annually on education ($17,260 per student) yet nearly 30 percent of its students don’t graduate high school on time. Only 18 percent of students in grades 3 through 8 test at age-appropriate levels in math, and 25 percent do so in reading.”
And that was before the evidence came in from pandemic lockdowns. I cannot even imagine what the situation is today.
The author tells the story of Luke Bronin, the mayor since 2016. What a pedigree! Phillips Exeter Academy, Yale University, Rhodes Scholar, Yale Law School, and U.S. Treasury with the Obama administration. Get this: he was “Deputy Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes.” All of which clearly means that you can rescue a collapsing city. He is, after all, handsome and articulate. This is seemingly the perfect man for the job!
What did he do? He defunded the police, oversaw a vast increase in crime, refused charter schools, and provoked a city bailout. When the money dried up, he hatched a new scheme called “regionalism” which was essentially a hunt for new sources of tax revenue from neighboring communities, which resented the heck out of the sales pitch and sent the guy packing.
Looking through the scene today, I’m struck by a gigantic “Black Lives Matter” painting in the middle of a main thoroughfare that includes a sign that explains the virtue of the messaging. The only thing is that there wasn’t anyone around to look at the sign. Everyone seems to have left the city. Sorry to report that after hours on weekdays, it becomes a ghost town. The weekends are the same.
The city still faces a disastrous pension problem owing to promises made long ago that cannot be kept except by pillaging anyone dumb enough to hang around for it. Something needs to change. Otherwise the Catch-22 will never end: higher taxes to fund the pensions but fewer and fewer residents to tax. And the same problem pertains on the other end: cut taxes to attract residents and business but then starve the city of revenue it needs to fund education and pension obligations, not to mention repair roads.
My read on the situation: there is a solution. It is is rather obvious. But it is verboten on ideological grounds. A person like the great Luke Brodin simply will not consider the right path because everything in his education and his social circle has told him that the path to the good society comes from higher taxes, more bailouts, and endless virtue-signaling.
How long can ideology that leads to an endless downward spiral last? Probably forever. Ideology of this sort is a kind of terminal disease. People die with it, and kill cities along the way. The story of the death of so many once-great American cities is a story of fanaticism, illusion, Ivy-League pedigree, social snobbery, ideological entrenchment, and the complete denial of reality.
