Revolting ‘Redevelopment’ in the Nutmeg State

May 15, 2008

Things aren’t going so well for Connecticut’s “redevelopment” lobby.

In city after city, its dreams of urban “revitalization” are turning into nightmares of missed deadlines, financial troubles, and legal woes.

In fact, it’s tough to find a Nutmeg State redevelopment project that isn’t experiencing major problems. This pathetic tale should surprise no one, because both inexorable demographic forces and the inevitable consequences of economic planning doom such projects to failure before their blueprints are drafted.  

More on that later. For now, let’s take a tour of recent redevelopment wreckage in Connecticut.

The best place to start is the city with the Mother of All Redevelopment Boondoggles: New London. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 blessing of the New London Development Corporation’s seizure of homes -- a decision Institute for Justice attorney Scott Bullock has called “perhaps the most universally despised Supreme Court decision in recent memory” -- not much “development” has taken place in the Fort Trumbull area.

The NLDC’s “preferred developer” was supposed to start building luxury apartments and townhouses last year, which would then be followed by the construction of a hotel, Coast Guard museum, and office buildings. But deadlines kept slipping, and unless the developer can secure financing by the end of this month, it may be out of a job.

Over the last few weeks, the ugly side of Bridgeport’s redevelopment schemes has been highlighted through a legal squabble initiated by a jilted developer of the city’s Steel Point property. Alex Conroy claims that in 2000, ex-mayor Joseph P. Ganim (currently inmate #14466-014 at the Federal Correctional Institution in Fort Dix, New Jersey) scuttled his bid to develop the site in an attempt to secure kickbacks from a rival developer. Conroy’s civil suit may not be as strong as he claims, but it has dredged up the Ganim-era sleaziness the city hoped it had left behind. Who’s paying for Ganim’s $200-an-hour defense? That would be you, Joe and Jane Taxpayer.

And then there’s Hartford. “New England’s Rising Star” received hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies for redevelopment in recent years. But private-sector funds continue to be puny. The “Front Street” development, part of the “Adriaen’s Landing” project created by ex-governor John Rowland (another pol who went to the hoosegow for too-cozy relations with the private sector), is years behind schedule, and on its third developer. Its retail space has been drastically scaled back, and its housing units abandoned.

The tiny municipality of Derby -- in Connecticut, redevelopment isn’t just for big cities -- is engaged in a nasty spat with its former “preferred developer.” At the end of 2007, the Board of Alderman dumped Ceruzzi Derby Redevelopment LLC, citing the firm’s failure to build any retail, residential, or office space on the south side of Main Street. Now the city is suing, to force mediation of the dispute and permit it to seek new developers. (Ceruzzi has threatened “years of litigation” if Derby taxpayers don’t pony up the $4.5 million it spent on the project.)

The list of troubled projects doesn’t end there. Waterbury, New Haven, Norwich, Meriden, Mansfield, Windham, Bristol, and a dozen other municipalities are showering dwindling tax revenue on developments of dubious merit. Few are likely to accomplish the promises made in gushing press releases, because proponents fail to grasp how and why Nutemggers live as they do.

Connecticut residents have been fleeing cities for decades. Hartford’s population decline began not in the ‘90s, ‘80s, ‘70s, or even ‘60s, but ‘50s. In 1900, 72 percent of the capital area’s residents lived in Hartford. A century later, a mere 26 percent did. Only one of Connecticut’s large municipalities, Stamford, has gained population since 1970.

In this rare instance, the behavior of Connecticut’s citizens mirrors that of the nation’s. A 2002 survey for the National Association of Realtors found that less than 10 percent of people want to live closer to “the city” and government-run transit -- over 80 percent desire a single-family home in the suburbs. Those are difficult numbers to overcome, especially since shopping centers, restaurants, and healthcare providers now supply suburbanites and rural dwellers amenities once offered only by urban cores.

Armed with paeans to the glory days of downtowns and phony-baloney “marketing research,” the politicians, urban planners, “smart growth” naïfs, and developers who push redevelopment projects are undeterred by either facts or logic.

In a struggling economy that’s pushing both state and local finances into the red, how much longer should taxpayers be forced to fund their fantasies?

D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and public-policy researcher. He can be reached at muskacolumn@cox.net.

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