Posts Tagged ‘Darien’

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: 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!

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.

 

What $500,000 will buy you in Southwestern Connecticut

Thursday, April 25, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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Want to live on the water for less than $500,000? Give Stratford a look. We found this two-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom condo with a deck and 1,478 square feet of living space on the market for $475,000. The Census reports the median value of an owner-occupied house in the town is $289,300.

Want to live on the water for less than $500,000? Give Stratford a look. We found this two-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom condo with a deck and 1,478 square feet of living space on the market for $475,000. The Census reports the median value of an owner-occupied house in the town is $289,300.

Last week, 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. The short answer: Not much. So we decided to raise the budget a little bit and shop around Southwestern Connecticut, armed wit a $500,000 budget.

Just like last week, we saw quite the variation from town to town, which makes sense. According to the Census, the median value of an owner-occupied unit in Naugatuck comes in at $221,400, so the budget stretched pretty far in that town. But in places like Greenwich and Westport, where the median value of homes is more than $1 million, it was slim pickings.

Trending: Where the ‘Best High Schools’ are

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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Darien’s Blue Wave surged to the top of the state’s schools, as Darien High School earned the honor of being named the No. 1 high school in the state in this year’s U.S. News list of Best High Schools.

Darien leapfrogged several other local schools as it rose from Connecticut’s No. 7 high school last year. Nationally, the school rose from No. 324 to No. 217, just barely missing the cutoff for the top 1 percent of high schools across the country, according to Robert Morse, the director of data research at U.S. News.

“There are 21,000 high schools that we rank, so the top 1 percent would be the top 210 schools,” Morse said Monday. “So basically Darien is more or less in the top 1 percent.”

The full rankings, which will be released on Tuesday, include several Southwestern Connecticut schools in the top tier: Weston High School was named the No. 3 high school in the state; Ridgefield High School was named No. 4; Wilton High School was named No. 6; Staples High School was named No. 7; Joel Barlow High School was named No. 9; and Fairfield Ludlowe High School was named No. 11.

All seven schools were within the top 500 schools across the nation, earning them the distinction of “gold medal” schools. Another 1,790 schools were awarded silver medals in the list.

While other local schools like New Canaan High School and Greenwich High School were not among the top 500 schools in the nation, they were  included in the silver medal list, released Tuesday. New Canaan High School was ranked at No. 15, while Greenwich High School was No. 21 in the state.

The list, which is compiled by U.S. News in partnership with the American Institutes for Research, evaluates student performance on state tests, as well as how effectively schools educate their minority and economically disadvantaged students. College- and career-readiness is determined using student performance on Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams.

In Darien, Superintendent Stephen Falcone said a total of 299 students took an AP test during the 2011-2012 school year, which is the timespan that was measured in the ranking. Of the roughly 600 tests that were taken by Darien students that school year, 95 percent of the tests came back with a passing score – a 3, 4 or 5 out of 5 – and more than 50 percent were graded at a 5.

“Back in 2008, we had under 400 tests being taken and now we have 600,” he said Monday. “And you would think that by the virtue of more students taking the test that the scoring would not be as strong, but kids work hard, the teachers work hard, and that cooperative effort has yielded great results.”

But AP tests are just part of a broader picture of what is happening inside the hallways at Darien High School, Falcone said. And while being named to the top of the list is exciting news, the superintendent said a ranking number says little about the true value of the education offered to students.

“It’s a testament to the hard work that our teachers, students and administrators put in at the high school and really across the district to make sure that students have an appropriately challenging experience, and that it’s a place where they can grow not only academically but personally,” he said. “It’s a nice recognition, but we want to take a look at ourselves and what we do well and where we need to grow every year, regardless of where we are in any type of ranking.”

When it comes to true excellence, it’s the whole child that matters, said Tammy Sload, co-president of the Darien High School Parent Association.

“There’s a commitment to excellence across all kinds of pursuits, from academic to sports and music, and because of that it gives kids a lot of different ways to find out what they’re good at and to excel,” Sload said.

It’s a similar story in some of the other schools named to the list.

“Right now, the national conversation is all about college- and career-readiness. So kids hear how important it is to be ready for being successful in college and to have a viable career. But teenagers live in the here and now – so our message is that high school is an extremely important part of your life,” said Tom McMorran, principal of Joel Barlow High School in Redding.

“Bruce Springsteen sings songs about the glory days, not about being 50. So often with the impetus about core standards and high-pressure assessments, that’s all about when you’re older and someday needing these skills. But we’re saying what’s important is right here and right now, being a part of this dynamic community,” McMorran said.

By making a concerted effort to ensure students’ needs are met by providing outlets to reach their potential socially and athletically, students are then able to focus their minds on the academic, he said.

“We’re always proud of these things, but it’s important to note that this is just one metric” said Robert O’Donnell, principal of Wilton High School. “This is not something we necessarily put the greatest weight on. We look at many different metrics to get a broad understanding of how our students are doing, but I’m proud of the high school and of our school community.”

The smaller school districts in Fairfield County are no strangers to national praise and recognition, while larger districts with more economic diversity and other hurdles that complicate student achievement are often left off. But while the majority of Connecticut schools named to the state’s top 10 are small, more-affluent and predominately white schools, Morse said the whole list includes a good number of more diverse institutions.

In total, 30 percent of the gold-medal schools had poverty rates of 25 percent and higher among their student bodies, and 67 percent of schools had enrollments with 25 percent or more of their population identifying as non-white, according to Morse.

Morse cited William H. Hall High School in West Hartford as an example of a more diverse school on the Connecticut list. The high school, in which roughly one-third of students are non-white, was named the No. 8 school in Connecticut in this year’s ranking. Other schools in Connecticut’s Top Ten include Conard High School in West Hartford at No. 2, Farmington High School in Farmington at No. 5 and the Connecticut International Baccalaureate Academy in East Hartford, which was No. 1 in the state last year, at No. 10.

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

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