Posts Tagged ‘Census’

Trending: Where We Spend the Most on Students

Tuesday, May 21, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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The U.S. Census Bureau released a report Tuesday that showed the per-pupil expenditure across the nation decreased in 2011, for the first time since the bureau began collecting the data in 1977. On average, districts across the country spent $10,560 per pupil that year, down 0.4 percent from 2010.

96367000We checked out public records of what districts here in Southwestern Connecticut spend per pupil. The most recent data available from the State was from 2010, and it shows that all but one town in our area spent more than $10,560, as well as the roughly $10,600 spent on average in 2010. In fact, the per-pupil spending in several towns wasn’t far off from double that figure.

According to the census, “the top spenders were New York ($19,076), the District of Columbia ($18,475), Alaska ($16,674), New Jersey ($15,968) and Vermont ($15,925).” While Southwestern Connecticut didn’t have any towns with higher rates than New York or D.C., there were several that outspent Alaska. The same wasn’t true on the flip side.

The five states with the lowest per-pupil expenditure were Mississippi (7,928), Arizona ($7,666), Oklahoma ($7,587), Idaho ($6,824) and Utah ($6,212). But the 2010 numbers for Southwestern Connecticut show there isn’t a single district below the $10,000 mark, nor would there be with a 0.4 percent reduction.

Trending: Where the Renters Live

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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Across the nation, renters account for more than one in three residents of occupied housing units, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. But here in Southwestern Connecticut, the rate is a little bit lower at 28.8 percent.

If we were to compare the national rate of renters with the rate in a local community, Norwalk would be the one town in Southwestern Connecticut that comes closest to sharing the national profile. In Norwalk, 34.9 percent of occupied housing units are home to renters, while 65.1 percent are home to owners, making the city just slightly more renter-heavy than the nation, which hovers at 33.9 percent.

While there’s nothing incredibly out of the ordinary about the number of percentage of renters in Southwestern Connecticut when compared to the national figures, the growing share of renters in towns like Norwalk is climbing at a much faster rate than it is nationally. In 2005, only 38.6 percent of Norwalk’s occupied units were home to renters, but an addition of thousands of units to the rental market between then and 2011 helped push Norwalk ahead of the national average.

Similarly, other local cities have seen their rental rates increase at a faster rate than the rest of the nation between 2005 and 2011, according to census data, including Bridgeport, which has climbed from 51.1 percent to 55.4 percent and Stamford, which inched up a bit more slowly from 42.3 percent to 43.6 percent.

But what is it that keeps the overall share of renters in our area so low when such a large share of residents in the area’s biggest cities are renters? It’s those tiny towns, holding down the fort for owners. Fourteen of the 31 towns in Southwestern Connecticut have an 85 percent share of owners or greater, including the town of Easton, where only 2.6 percent of residents are renting.

Trending: When Women Become Moms

Saturday, May 11, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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FAIRFIELD – Marisa Torrieri Bloom sat on the kitchen floor of the house she rents in Fairfield, knees crossed and bending over, as she lifted a blue and green spoon to her 10-month-old son’s lips. It was dinner time in the Bloom household, and since her son, Nathan, was feeling under the weather, Bloom took the banana puree to a place he would be more comfortable than his high chair where he usually eats.

Marisa Torrieri Bloom spends some time with her son Nathan, 10 months, after work at their home on Andrassy Avenue in Fairfield, Conn. on Wednesday May 8, 2013. The Bloom family is part of a trend where couples are waiting until later in life to have children.

Marisa Torrieri Bloom spends some time with her son Nathan, 10 months, after work at their home on Andrassy Avenue in Fairfield, Conn. on Wednesday May 8, 2013. The Bloom family is part of a trend where couples are waiting until later in life to have children.

“I never thought this would be my life,” said Bloom, 37, who is originally from Silver Spring, Md., but spent her late 20s and early 30s living in New York City.

“If you’d told me a few years ago that right now I would be in Fairfield County about to buy a house with a little baby, I would have thought that was the most boring thing ever,” she said.

It doesn’t seem so boring this Mother’s Day. These days, it’s pretty blissful — and a little stressful, when she factors in her full-time writing job and part-time gig as a guitar teacher. And after worrying whether she would be able to have her first child at age 36, Bloom said she is thrilled to have Nathan and her husband Zack by her side.

Here in Southwestern Connecticut, women have children later in their lives than in most other parts of the country.

The Bridgeport-Stamford Metropolitan Statistical Area — which covers the same ground as the footprint of Fairfield County — has the second highest percentage of 35- to 50-year-old mothers in the nation. In total, census data shows that a little more than 36 percent of Fairfield County mothers who gave birth within a recent year were in that age bracket, lagging slightly behind the No. 1 metropolitan area: Boulder, Colo.

Nationally, the figure is much lower, at about 20 percent, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

“I’ve been working in the Stamford area since 1995, and we have many women who are 35 to 45 having children — not necessarily their first child — but many women having a child then,” said Dr. Elisabeth Aronow, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Fairfield County OB-Gyn, who spends most of her time practicing in Stamford and Darien.

Darien’s rates of new moms between ages 35 and 50 are even higher than the Fairfield County norm. Of the 25 towns in Southwestern Connecticut with at least 100 births in a recent year, the town had the second highest percentage of moms in that age bracket, at 64 percent. It was barely outranked by New Fairfield, where 66.9 percent of births were to women between ages 35 and 50.

Part of the reason there is such a high percentage of older women having babies is likely because women begin the motherhood process at a much later age in Connecticut. While Aronow noted that not all children delivered to an older mother will be the first child in the birth order, the most recent data available from the National Center for Health Statistics shows Connecticut and New Jersey were tied for having the second-oldest average age of a mother at first birth in 2006, at 27.2 years old, just behind Massachusetts’s 27.7 average age.

That year, the average age across the nation was 25, but while the NCHS said there are no more current figures for state-by-state breakdowns, the national average has continued to creep up slowly in recent years, to 25.4 years old in 2010 — a trend that a NCHS spokesman said is likely to be mirrored in Connecticut.

The reason for older moms in the Nutmeg State is multifaceted, but in a paper published by the Pew Research Center on Friday, Gretchen Livingston, a senior researcher at the Washington, D.C.-based “fact tank” wrote that a record share of new moms are now college educated, which can have a significant effect on the age at which mothers give birth.

In 2011, roughly two out of three mothers had at least some college education, up from about one in two in 1990, according to Livington’s report.

“And I would expect that in more affluent areas, where women have more education, it’s not a surprise that they would tend to be older when they have babies,” Livingston said Friday morning.

Fairfield County women, on the whole, are more educated than women across the nation. In this area, 39.7 percent of women who are 18 or older hold at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 25.7 percent nationally.

Not only does earning a four-year or advanced degree often lead to delaying a marriage or the decision to become parents by several years simply to make time for education, there is also a high correlation between well-educated couples and the traditional order of marriage followed by parenthood, Livingston said.

Especially in Southwestern Connecticut.

“A number of people wait,” Aronow said. “Having children is one along the list of things to be ready for. It’s ‘We need our dog. We need our house, and then we can consider having children . . . I think there are many people around here with that Type-A personality, and everything has a time and an order for it to fit in.”

Marisa and Zack Bloom, both of whom hold a master’s degree, followed that order in their relationship, and after beginning to date in May 2008, when Marisa was 32, they found the pressure mounting to kick things into high gear. They were married in August of 2010, and began trying to conceive after about a year.

“I was very tense about the fact that I would be getting married at 34, and 35 was like this number I had in my head: ‘Must start before I turn 35. Must start before I turn 35.’ So I feel like it did start getting more prominent in the back of my head,” Marisa Bloom said.

“I mean, my parents were at my throat. They were like, ‘You know, we had two kids by the time we were 33,’” she said with a laugh.

When Marisa was born in 1976, the average age for a mother to give birth for the first time was 24.6 years old, and her mother was a few years older than that. Nathan is the first grandchild for Marisa’s parents in Maryland, and Zack’s parents who still live in Wilton where he grew up.

The pressure didn’t seem as heavy for Zack, who is seven years younger than his wife, and celebrated his 30th birthday last summer.

“I never had any pressure. I just knew I didn’t want to be an older dad when my kids were in high school and college, and I knew that people around here get married later, so this is more normal,” he said. “I’m a high-energy person, so I wanted to be able to play sports and be an active father with my kids. And in my late 20s and early 30s, I figured then I would be in my late 40s or early 50s when they’re in high school and college, so I could still be cool.”

The timing worked out for the couple, who said they plan to begin trying for a second baby in a few months, when Marisa has finished nursing Nathan.

“It’s funny, like would I space it out if I could?” Marisa asked. “That’s such a hard question to answer, because I don’t have the option of not spacing it out. But it’s good, fortuitous, that I want to try this summer because there really is no other choice.”

It still comes as a shock to Marisa when she examines her life from the outside. After living in the New York City bubble for so many years, where she felt like she was “living in an ageless place,” she still has trouble realizing she is 37 already — and that life is more baby gates and feeding time than Brooklyn bars and concerts.

“Life actually began for me when I was 30,” she said, spooning out another dose of the banana puree, some of which had made its way into her long blonde hair, courtesy of Nathan’s sticky fingers.

“We just had an offer accepted on a house in Fairfield,” she said. “It’s weird because now I feel like I really am a grownup. I have the house, a kid, a husband. It’s like it’s all complete.”

maggie.gordon@scni.com; 203-964-2229; http://twitter.com/MagEGordon; http://facebook.com/TrendingWithMaggieGordon

Trending: Where the Working Moms Live

Thursday, May 9, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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WorkingMom

Mother’s Day is coming on Sunday, and in honor of the holiday, we decided to take a peek at mothers around Southwestern Connecticut to get a sense for how they compare to mothers across the country.

Nationally, about 6 in 10 new mothers are a part of the labor force, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Here in Connecticut the rate is a bit higher, at 66.9 percent. But you’ll find a lot of variation from town to town — some that you would expect, and some that you wouldn’t. For instance, would you have guessed that working moms are actually less common in Stamford than they are in New Canaan?

We picked through census data to compare the rates of working mothers across the 31 towns in Southwestern Connecticut, but there were a few towns we had to leave off the list, due to a low number of births, which could skew the numbers (Easton, Monroe, Redding, Seymour, Sherman and Weston all had fewer than 100 births registered in the newest census data set and were left off the analysis). On the whole, Southwestern Connecticut lined up with the national trends; 14 of the 25 towns had a higher percentage of working moms than the national average.

But there were also some outliers. Across America, there is only one state with fewer than half of new moms in the labor force: Utah, with 49.1 percent. But here in Southwestern Connecticut, there are six towns with figures even lower than Utah’s, including Westport, which had the fewest working new mothers at 34 percent.

Stay tuned for a special Sunday edition of Trending in this week’s paper for more on motherhood in Southwestern Connecticut!

Trending: Who is Voting

Wednesday, May 8, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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The percentage of black voters in a presidential election eclipsed the voter turnout rate for white Americans for the first time in 2012, marking a watershed moment in American politics.

“This is a more diverse electorate than ever before,” said Robert Bernstein, a spokesperson for the U.S. Census Bureau.

Here in Connecticut, black voter turnout has not yet overshadowed white turnout, but the trend is pushing that way. In 1996, only 32.6 percent of black voters made their way to the polls to decide the race between President Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. But in 2012, when President Barack Obama faced off challenger Mitt Romney, that rate was 30 percentage points higher, coming in at a 62.2 percent turnout rate for black voters – only 3.6 percentage points lower than white turnout, closing a gap that had been 30 percentage points wide 16 years earlier.

Voting at Cesar Batalla School, in Bridgeport, Conn. on Election Day, Nov. 6th, 2012.

Voting at Cesar Batalla School, in Bridgeport, Conn. on Election Day, Nov. 6th, 2012.

That rate of shift is much quicker than the national rate, according to a new report, released Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau, which found that “since 1996, Black voting rates have gone from trailing those of non-Hispanic Whites by about 8 percentage points to surpassing them in 2012.”

It’s difficult to say what this will mean for the American electorate, said Ronal Schurin, an associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut.

“President Obama won this election because he had not just a very high percentage of minority votes, but because the turnout was high, and there are some who speculate the turnout was high among African Americans in particular,” Schurin said Wednesday. And there is one theory about the key factor that tipped the scales in that direction.

“President Obama has a special appeal to African American voters in the same way that President Kennedy did for Roman Catholic voters,” Schurin said. “There was a special dynamic in the 2012 presidential election and I’m going to be very interested to see what happens in the midterm elections in 2014.”

The increasing black turnout is certainly part of an upward trend, but it isn’t easy to predict how that will continue in 2016 if the candidates aren’t black themselves. Though there is one thing that Schurin said is certain: The Republican Party has a choice to make.

“The Republican Party’s percentage among white voters is very high,” said Schurin. “They can try as (President) Bush did in 2004, to increase turnout in white voters by making a really concerted campaign and make up for the discrepancy that way. Or they can try to increase their appeal among minority voters.”

If the demographic shift of the nation is any indicator, the only way to sustain growth over the long term for the Republican Party would be to widen their appeal among black and Hispanic voters.

According to projections by the U.S. Census Bureau, the nation will be one of minority majority in 30 years’ time, meaning that by the time 2043 rolls around, there will be fewer white citizens than there will non-white citizens in America.

And while the black population will continue to grow, the growth in Hispanic residents will continue its strong surge in the next few decades. In a research paper published by the Washington, D.C.-based fact tank The Pew Research Center, researchers declared that by 2050, this Hispanic population could account for as much as 29 percent of the nation’s population, up from 17 percent today. At the same time, black population would increase from 12 to 13 percent, as the Asian population climbs from 5 percent to 9 percent. At the same time, the white population’s share of the total nation would fall from 63 percent in 2011 to 47 percent in 2050, according to Pew.

The Hispanic population has been growing more quickly than all other ethnic groups for several years now, and that swing has also been seen at the voting booth.

“Nationally, we found that the voting rates (for the Hispanic population) were much lower than for blacks and non-Hispanic whites,” said Bernstein. “But even if their rates didn’t change, the fact that the Hispanic population is growing does give them a larger share of the electorate.”
At the time of the 1996 election, there were 18.4 million Hispanic Americans living in the country; by last November that number had almost doubled to 35.2 million people, and the number of those Americans casting ballots more than doubled from 4.9 million in 1996 to 11.2 million in 2012.

In Connecticut, the number of Hispanic voters increased from 49,000 in 1996 to 103,000 in 2012, according to the census. Still, the turnout rate among Hispanic voters in Connecticut has only increased by 13.7 percent since 1996, which is significantly lower than the 21.3 percent increase seen nationally.

This means the majority of the increase is due to the larger share of the population held by Hispanic Americans these days, rather than an upswing of voting among members of the Hispanic community. But even with lower turnout rates than white and black voters, the Hispanic population is growing enough to add to the changing landscape of American voters, which will likely spur changes in the way candidates run their campaigns in the near future.

maggie.gordon@scni.com; 203-964-2229; http://twitter.com/MagEGordon; http://facebook.com/TrendingWithMaggieGordon

 

What $1 million will buy you in Southwestern Connecticut

Thursday, May 2, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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In Newtown, the median value of an owner-occupied home is $463,400, but there’s still a healthy selection of homes closer to the top of our price range, like this contemporary four-bedroom. The house, which is listed at $999,900, sits on 4.85 acres of land, and offers 6,547 square feet of living space.

This home in Newtown is listed just below the $1 million mark. Check out the slideshow below to see what that budget gets you in every town in Southwestern Connecticut.

A couple weeks ago, we looked at what the average New Englander’s home-buying budget of $260,000 would get for house hunters in our neck of the woods. In case you forgot, there wasn’t really much to offer in most towns. So last week, we upped the budget to a half-million dollars and saw a lot more variety around the area, including some real gems.

But in some of the towns, there was still a limited real estate pool to pick from (Location, Location, Location…). So here we go again, upping the budget once more to take a look at million-dollar listings across the 31 towns in Southwestern Connecticut. In some towns, we couldn’t even find homes to max out our budget, while others only scraped the tip of the iceberg for some of the high-price housing stock.

Check out what we were able to find in every town in our area.

Trending: Where the Growth is Slow

Wednesday, May 1, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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In 1960, more than one in four residents of Southwestern Connecticut lived within Bridgeport’s city boundaries. But decades of population loss in the area’s largest city, coupled with thriving suburban communities, have removed the Park City from its throne as the center of this corner of the state. In 2010, about one in eight Southwestern Connecticut residents called Bridgeport home.

It’s still the area’s largest city, but Bridgeport’s claim to that title appears to be approaching its expiration date. In 1950, the city had more than twice as many residents as Stamford. Sixty years later, the 75,000-resident gap has narrowed to 20,000 residents, with Stamford poised to overtake Bridgeport in a few years.

A postcard, featuring a historic image of downtown Bridgeport, at the corner of Fairfield Avenue and Main Street.

A postcard, featuring a historic image of downtown Bridgeport, at the corner of Fairfield Avenue and Main Street.

That tale of two cities is due in part to the recent surge of residents Stamford has experienced, growing by 20,000 residents in the past 30 years, but mostly it’s a story of Bridgeport’s struggles through deindustrialization and the drug wave that invaded the city’s streets a few decades ago, two misfortunes that pushed Bridgeport to the bottom of the barrel in terms of Southwestern Connecticut’s population growth in the last half-century.

As the Southwestern Connecticut region grew by 42.2 percent between the 1960 and 2010 decennial census reports, Bridgeport is one of two cities that have shrunk in that time, losing 8 percent of city residents; Ansonia is the other, having lost 2.9 percent. At the same time, 15 of the 31 towns in the area have at least doubled.

But Bridgeport isn’t alone in its population decline. Between 1960 and 2010, the American population increased by 72 percent, but many towns along Connecticut’s Gold Coast found their populations ticking upward in small increments — some by design.

In Darien, the town’s population only increased by 12.5 percent during the 50-year-period, while Greenwich’s increased by 13.7 percent, lagging far behind the national growth of 72 percent.

“Limiting development, imposing minimum lot requirements and not having a whole lot of developable land available has always been a technique by which to raise the cost of admission into a town,” said Steven Lanza, executive editor of The Connecticut Economy, a quarterly publication published through the economics department at the University of Connecticut.

“Obviously, residents would love to be able to move into a Greenwich or a West Hartford, or something where public services are high and schools are good, but the cost of admission is buying a home” due to a very limited rental market, he said.

Bridgeport’s population figures faltered as factories shuttered and the rust set in during the latter half of the 20th century, much like many other cities in the Northeast. Cities such as Schenectady, Syracuse and Scranton lost 24, 32 and 31 percent of their populations, respectively, between 1960 and the turn of the century, accounting for a far faster flight than Bridgeport’s 11 percent decline.

In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Bridgeport saw the lion’s share of its businesses seep out of the city boundaries, to suburban office parks in neighboring towns such as Trumbull and Fairfield, and in many cases, residents followed, said David Kooris, Bridgeport’s director of planning and economic development.

But deindustrialization was just the beginning of the problems for the once booming city along the Sound. With the loss of businesses, the city’s tax base shrunk, passing responsibility for funding public programs on to the taxpayers that remained.

“The higher taxes drove out the middle class and the upper class into the suburban areas with lower mill rates,” said Thomas W. Bucci, an attorney in the city who served as Bridgeport’s mayor from 1985 to 1989.

And just when it seemed like Bridgeport was ready for a comeback in the late 1980s, it was knocked off its feet again by a massive drug wave, which held the city hostage for several years.

“No one foresaw the crack epidemic, the explosion,” Bucci said.

“It was a huge setback. Neighborhoods that were on the verge of improving – the ones on that fine line – were taken over by drug gangs,” he said. “For a while, it was just open season in the city, our murder rate must have gone from 20 in 1987 to like 60 the following year, and it all had to do with that crack epidemic hitting the streets.”

According to data from the FBI, the crime level rose more gradually, though the increase was still huge. In 1985, the city reported 30 homicides; in 1990, the number was up to 57. It peaked at an all-time high in 1993, when there were 60 murders recorded in Bridgeport, according to the FBI’s uniform crime reports.

Now, Bridgeport is beginning to bounce back. After losing 11 percent of its population between 1960 and 2000, the city felt its first uptick in a half-century during the decade between 2000 and 2010, growing by 3.4 percent. And crime rates are down significantly: there were 22 homicides reported in 2010.

“I think Bridgeport has turned a corner, reputation wise and image wise,” said Bucci, adding that “at this point in time, it would be very easy for Bridgeport to fall backward, but I don’t see that happening. I see activity, I see commercial development, and I see growth even though the financial times are very difficult.”

That growth is an uphill battle for civil servants such as Kooris, who are attempting to market Bridgeport as an urban hub for millennials to call home. Some trends are on his side, he said, noting that “for the first time in a generation, the path the nation is on takes people directly to Bridgeport and places like it,” as people begin to move away from the suburbs and back to urban centers in droves. But it’s still not easy going for a city that has become notorious for its seedy reputation.

“There’s definitely a perception problem, without a doubt … with people who haven’t been down here in 10 or 15 years who have no idea what it’s like today,” said Kooris.

“There are a half-dozen buildings downtown that have come online in the last six or seven years that are completely filled with young professionals who have moved here from the city,” said Kooris.

There are more in the pipeline, which Kooris said will help put Bridgeport back on the map as a place to live for young professionals looking for easy access to transportation and downtown living in a more affordable setting than Manhattan and even Stamford.

The progress on that front is already measurable: In 2006, 13.8 percent of the city’s residents were between ages of 25 and 34, but by 2011, the age group had grown steadily, increasing to 16.7 percent of the city’s residents.

“We absolutely love it here,” said Madeline Rhodes, 27, who moved to Bridgeport from her native Westchester County along with her boyfriend in 2008. The pair lives in a loft they purchased on Lafayette Avenue. The residence is new, but the building is old; before it was flipped into a housing unit, the large brick building was the site of the Warnaco factory, which was the largest undergarment manufacturer in the nation.

“A lot of people, when we first told them we were moving here, were questioning why,” said Rhodes, who said the city’s affordability was the key attraction for the young couple, who was able to find a 3,500 square-foot home they purchased shortly after completing college.

“Our families were worried about our safety and the potential of the city. But we fell in love with the home, the fact that we’re less than a minute away from the water, and just this beautiful city waiting to be rediscovered,” she said. “I guess you have to be a certain kind of person to move here, in that you have to be ready to push hard and fight for this city, and feel like you can help make a difference here — but we love this city, and we’re all in this together.”
maggie.gordon@scni.com; 203-964-2229; http://twitter.com/MagEGordon; http://facebook.com/TrendingWithMaggieGordon

Trending: Where the ‘stressed’ live

Monday, April 29, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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Feeling stressed? Well, you’re not alone. Across the state of Connecticut, 43 percent of residents said they feel stressed on any given day, according to a poll released by Gallup last week. That places the Nutmeg State in the Top 10 most stressed-out states across the country.

Wonder where stress is likely to be the worst in our area? We sorted through stacks of census data to compare the number of hours workers in each town put in at their jobs every week, in an effort to pinpoint the towns that are likely to have the most-stressed citizens.

On average, Connecticut workers clock a total of 38.2 hours of work every week, according to the census data. But here in Southwestern Connecticut, we spend extra hours behind our desks than our neighbors around the state. We found – among other things – that workers in 22 of the 31 towns in Southwestern Connecticut worked more than the state average. How many hours a week do the people in your town work?

Let us know how this stacks up against your personal experience in the comments section below.

 

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