Posts Tagged ‘Fairfield County’

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 Multimillion-Dollar Homes Are

Friday, May 17, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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A 50-acre estate in Greenwich came on the market this week for $190 million.

A 50-acre estate in Greenwich came on the market this week for $190 million.

When the 50-acre estate with sweeping views of Cos Cob Harbor hit the market with a $190 million price tag Friday, its presence reverberated through the real estate world, taking the title of the nation’s most expensive listing.

“It’s a great property,” said Joseph Barbieri of Sotheby’s International, a real estate firm that had been in the running to represent the estate, which is being listed by David Ogilvy & Associates. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for someone who wants to own acreage. There’s no perfect property in Greenwich, but this is certainly significant.”

Walter Molony, a spokesman at the National Association of Realtors, said 1.8 percent of homes sold across the country in March commanded a final price over the $1 million mark. The association doesn’t even keep track of price clusters any higher than that because “they’re really just outliers,” he said.

But Greenwich real estate is far from a mirror of Anytown, USA.

According to Daisy Kong, a spokeswoman for the real estate website Trulia, eight of the 10 most expensive properties in Connecticut are nestled in Greenwich; the other two are in Old Saybrook and Cornwall.

Currently, 76 percent of the homes listed for sale in Greenwich are asking more than $1 million, and the vast majority are likely to sell over that threshold. According to Trulia, the average sale price of a Greenwich house these days is $1.1 million. Add in 4,000 feet of waterfront, a couple of islands and 12 bedrooms (two of which are oval-shaped), and the ticket price climbs pretty quickly — all the way to a record-shattering $190 million for the property on Indian Field Road, near Greenwich’s Bruce Park.

Before Victorian, French-renaissance mansion, which was built in 1898, made its presence known this week, Greenwich’s most expensive property on the market was actor/director Mel Gibson’s former home, Old Mill Farm. That estate, which boasts more than 15,000 square feet of living space and 75 acres, is listed at $39.5 million, and is represented by Barbieri. Barbieri also holds the title of selling the highest-priced waterfront home in Greenwich: A house on Field Point Road that sold in 2011 for $39.5 million.

But Greenwich’s most expensive sale on the books came in 2004, when an 80-acre mid-century horse farm at 25 Lower Cross Road went for $45 million. While there have been several other eight-figure sales over the years, the nine-digit mark hasn’t yet been hit, despite at least one attempt.

“Take the Helmsley property, which came up on the market for $125 million. That sold for $35 million,” Barbieri said.

The Helmsley estate, a 40-acre property on Round Hill Road, dubbed “Dunnellen Hall,” was once owned by hotel and real estate tycoons Harry and Leona Helmsley, and included an opulent, 28-room mansion. After more than two years on the market, it sold for less than one-third of its asking price in late 2010.

“It’s an honor to sell these kinds of high-priced properties, and the upper end of the market is very saleable, though it does go through cycles. But the one essential thing is the properties have to be reasonably priced. I don’t want to say competitively priced, because some of these properties have no comparable (properties), but they have to be intelligently priced,” Barbieri said.

Even in a town like Greenwich, where median household income is so high that the U.S. Census Bureau can’t quantify it in its typical ranges, listing a property for more than $100 million can be a risk. According to Daisy Kong, a spokeswoman for Trulia, the Greenwich estate joins only four other properties across the nation in that bracket, topping the previous heavyweight title holder, the penthouse at the Pierre Hotel, listed at $125 million and boasting a 360-degree view of Manhattan. Two of the other three nine-figure properties are also in New York, while the fourth is in Miami Beach, Fla.

“I wouldn’t want to be quoted as saying what I think it’s worth. But I think it’s safe to say it’s an ambitious price,” said Barbieri. “It will be interesting to see what happens with that. I’m not quite sure the value is there, but Greenwich is an interesting place.”

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

#ThrowbackThursday: What Your Town’s Downtown Looked Like in 1934

Thursday, May 16, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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A vintage postcard showing Main Street in Derby/File Photo

A vintage postcard showing Main Street in Derby/File Photo

Back in 1934, before Interstate 95 and other major connectors were built to patch together the disparate corners of Connecticut, the State completed an aerial survey of every inch of the Nutmeg State to document state land. The result is a massive amount of data that other states can only dream of. If you want to see what your neighborhood, block or street looked like 79 years ago, you can.

And now, thanks to a collaborative project between Trinity College and the University of Connecticut Libraries, Map and Geographic Information Center, how every square foot of this state has changed over the decades. The groups have stitched together the images and now offer a fascinating tool, which allows internet users to view any address in the state back in 1934, next to what it looks like now.

In some of these towns and cities, you’ll see a wholesale change, as farm pastures have been transformed into residential villages. In others, you’ll see the square boxes indicating houses in 1934 transform into a more urban, downtown commercial feel. And yes, the shady dots you see by the thousand in 1934 that have mysteriously disappeared by the 2013 version are trees. Some of the most interesting changes occur in towns where you can say major highways, like Route 8 or Interstate 95 pop up in the time between the two photos.

So without further ado, in honor of #ThrowbackThursday, here’s a peek at what the address of each Southwestern Connecticut town or city’s Town Hall looked like in 1934, and what it looks like these days.

And in case you’re curious, you can look up your own neighborhood (or anyone else’s for that matter) at the MAGIC website here.

 

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: Where students ace the APs

Tuesday, May 7, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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APSchools around all of Southwestern Connecticut are quieter than usual this week as students hunker down for the annual Advanced Placement tests.

APs are challenging exams given to high school students after they’ve completed coursework for what is essentially a college-level class. And if the students pass (with a score of 3, 4 or 5 out of 5), they’re eligible for college credit at most major institutions. But passing an AP exam isn’t always an easy thing to do.

We searched through records from Connecticut’s State Department of Education to see just how well students in the southwestern corner of the state are doing on these tests. It turns out they’re doing better than students across the state, on whole. According to test data from the 2011 academic year, which is the most recent year on file, 18.7 percent of Connecticut 12th graders earned a score of 3 or higher on at least one AP test that year. But here in Southwestern Connecticut, 21 of the 36 high schools had higher percentages than that, including two schools where more than half of the senior class did so. See how your school stacks up here:

Trending: Where the Horses Live

Saturday, May 4, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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03Wilton

Happy Derby Day!

Every year at this time, the nation watches as America’s elite race horses and jockeys gather at Churchill Downs in Kentucky for the annual running of the Kentucky Derby. But you don’t have to live in Kentucky to be a horse enthusiast — there are hundreds of horse farms right here in Connecticut.

We checked out the USDA’s most recent Census, which counted up the number of farms with horses and ponies in every ZIP code across Connecticut to see where the horses play. Truth be told, there aren’t all that many towns in Southwestern Connecticut with horse farms in the count (the heaviest populated horse town is Lebanon, Conn., upstate, where there are a total of 35 horse farms in the 06249 ZIP code), but we did find 14 ZIPs in our area with horse farms on the count. Check out the slideshow to see where you’re most likely to run into horseplay in Southwestern Connecticut.

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