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.
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.
“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.
When Women Become Moms, State by State
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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.”
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?
Trending: Where the Working Moms Live
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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!
Schools 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:
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.
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
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.
Most Stressed-Out States
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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?
Where We Work the Most
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Let us know how this stacks up against your personal experience in the comments section below.
In Ansonia you can get this three-bedroom house on North Westwood Road, which has 1,488 square feet of living space for $256,201.
The average New Englander expects to spend roughly $260,000 on their next home. But what happens when you take that same budget from one town to the next in our area?
A survey conducted by the National Association of Home Builders found that the average home buyer in America expects to pay $203,910 for their next home. Here’s how the NAHB explained the average American’s expectations in the organization’s report “What Home Buyers Really Want”:
Several years of declining home values have led home buyers to significantly adjust expectations of how much they are ready to pay for their next home (or have recently paid for one). In 2012, buyers expect to pay a median of $203,910 for their next home, which is 12 percent lower than their expected price was in 2007 ($230,900). The median price buyers expect to pay in 2012, nonetheless, is about 16 percent higher than it was in 2004 ($175,900).
But here in New England, prospective home buyers are prepared to pay a bit more. According to the survey of more than 3,600 home buyers, New England folks have the second highest expected price, at $259,555. The area in which home buyers have the highest expected price is in the Pacific portion of the country, where the expected price is $285,816. It’s the lowest in the East North Central section (Michigan, and surrounding states), where the expected price was recorded as $164,168.
We searched the real estate website Trulia to see what prospective homeowners could snatch up for $259,55 or less in every town in Southwestern Connecticut, and found that the properties vary quite a bit between towns. Check out what $260,000 buys you in each of the towns in Southwestern Connecticut.
What $260,000 will buy you in Southwestern Connecticut
There were plenty of reasons to be outside on a sunny Saturday morning in early April. Yet the inside of a convenience store on Connecticut Avenue in Norwalk was buzzing with activity near the lottery counter, with several people scratching tickets and others calling out strings of numbers to be fed into the terminal for the daily lottery draw in hopes of hitting it big.
If hitting it big is what the folks at One Stop Variety in Norwalk were looking to do, they were in the right place. A Hearst Connecticut Media Group analysis of lottery winners over the last four years shows that the store, which is in a strip mall near Exit 14 of Interstate-95, has sold more lottery tickets with prizes of $10,000 or greater than any other store in Southwestern Connecticut.
Between April 2009 and late March 2013, One Stop Variety sold 11 big winners, putting the store in a tie with a Shop Smart in Seymour and a Stop & Shop in Branford for top retailers in the state in that time.
“We sell a lot of lottery tickets here,” said Sohel Memon, a cashier who has worked at the store for two years. “People buy all of it, the scratch-off tickets, everything.”
But there’s one ticket played with more success than any other, he said.
“We get the most winners on 10X Cash,” he said, walking over to a plastic display case, where the $10 ticket was sitting in a cubby, labeled No. 44 of the more than 50 varieties of tickets the store had for sale.
Victor Figueroa, 47, of Stamford is one of three people who have earned a $10,000 prize as a result of buying that particular ticket at the Norwalk store, in what he called “a lucky shot.”
“Sometimes I stop in that store in the morning, when the guys I work with are grabbing breakfast at the deli in that strip mall,” he said Wednesday evening. “It’s just down the street from where I work, so I’ll play a little here or there. Not every day, but if I’m there in the morning, I’ll probably get a $5 or $10 scratch-off, whatever I have in my pocket.”
On Feb. 5, he happened to have $10 in his pocket, and after a few scratches on a 10X Cash, he soon had $10,000. It wasn’t the first time Figueroa won big at the store. In October of 2012, he won $10,000 on a $5 scratch-off ticket, purchased at the same store. Still, he says he likes the odds best on 10X Cash.
“You know, it’s funny, believe it or not, my neighbor across the street won $10,000 on 10X in downtown Stamford a couple months before I won on it,” he said. “It’s a good game — a lucky one.”
In addition to the three $10,000 winners One Stop Variety has sold for that ticket, there have also been smaller winners trickling through the teller on a regular basis, said Memon, who pointed to a string of banners taped to the walls and called out winners who have taken home $550, $2,000 and $5,000 from the ticket.
Maggie Gordon takes a swing at scratching off a ticket in hopes of pocketing a few bucks.
I tried my hand at hitting a jackpot, buying a 10X Cash of my own and crossing my fingers before putting them to work, scratching for glory. The purple ticket was decorated in Vegas-style lights, calling out reasons to play, such as “More than 100 $10,000 prizes,” “More than $17,000,000 in total prizes,” and “10 chances to win!”
It seemed simple. There was a column labeled “Your number,” to the left of another column labeled “Winning number.” All I had to do was hope the two numbers matched in any of the 10 rows, and I could win the prize hidden behind the three sacks of cash, just waiting to be scratched off.
I started slowly: My No. 23, winning No 58. Darn.
My No. 30, winning No. 53. Darn again.
By the 10th row (my No. 55, winning No. 46) my reaction was more damn than darn. I never even scratched the money sacks to see what I could have won.
Memon asked if I wanted to try again, but at $10 a pop, and with only $20 in my pocket, one failure was enough for me. A moment later, Gwen Grimes from Bridgeport bought the next ticket in the line.
“Nothing so far,” she murmured as her hand moved halfway down the card. By the end of the ticket, she declared that she had bought a dud.
While 10X Cash is the winningest scratch-off in the state, during the four years analyzed, with 102 winners claiming $10,000 or more, the ticket only pays out a winner once in every 3.95 tickets on average. While One Stop Variety has had more big winners than any other store in the state on the 10X Cash card, Stamford is home to the most large winners on the ticket than any other town.
Stamford has sold more lottery tickets paying out $10,000 or more than any other city in the state, with a total of 51 such payouts in the four-year period, including a $1 million Powerball ticket sold at Shippan Candies, which brought a windfall upon a group of employees at Toyota of Stamford in November 2012 and a $254 million Powerball prize sold nearby at the Shippan Point Getty in November 2011.
The city of Norwalk has sold the second-most big prizes, with 44, thanks in large part to One Stop Variety, and is tied with Bridgeport for the No. 2 spot. Danbury follows at No. 4, with 42 wins, and New Haven rounds out the top 5 with 36 winning tickets paying out $10,000 or more.
But while the city of Stamford has paid out more than $258 million in the last four years, making it Connecticut’s luckiest town, Grimes said she thinks Norwalk might have an edge on the nearby city.
“A lot of people know that people won big here, and that’s probably why there’s always so many people playing here,” she said as she took a rest between tickets.
A moment later she was back to it, in hopes that she might be the next person to have her name tacked to the wall at One Stop.
