As wealth and struggle coexist in Connecticut, these 7 numbers explain the inequality problem

CT Insider – Thursday, May 22, 2025
By Alex Putterman, Victoria Stavish

With great wealth and desperate struggle often coexisting only minutes away from each other, inequality can feel like a defining part of life in Connecticut.

But it’s not just a sense or a vibe — data backs up the feeling.

Stark disparities and segregation affect all aspects of life in the state, from housing to education. Here are some numbers that help explain inequality in Connecticut.

2nd

This is Connecticut’s rank among all states in the Gini coefficient, a measure economists use to measure income inequality.

According to the most recent data, Connecticut is tied with Louisiana in this measure and narrowly trails New York. Every other state has a more equal distribution of income.

At the high end of the income spectrum, Connecticut stands out, with more millionaires and billionaires per capita than most other states. Connecticut is less extreme at the low end of the income spectrum, with a lower poverty rate than most other states, but the combination of great wealth at the top and growing hardship at the bottom combine to produce this ranking.

While Connecticut certainly has great disparity between towns, it sometimes has significant inequality within them as well. Cornwall, Kent and Warren, all towns along the New York border in northwest Connecticut, have some of the highest Gini coefficients in the state, as does wealthy Greenwich.

$2.5 million

This was the average annual income of Connecticut’s top 1%, as of 2018, when the Economic Policy Institute released a comprehensive report on inequality in the United States. The top 1% of families took home more than 27% of all income in Connecticut, the report said.

This total was more than 37 times larger than the average annual income of Connecticut’s bottom 99%, marking the third-largest gap of any state, behind only New York and Florida.

By the same measure, the Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk metro area ranked as the fifth most unequal of any metro area nationally, with the top 1% earning 62 times as much as the bottom 99%, and Fairfield County ranked as the nation’s 12th most unequal county.

363,590

This is the number of Connecticut residents in poverty, according to a recent estimate from Connecticut Voices for Children.

Of those 363,590 people, an estimated 79,170 are children under age 18, and 74,540 are seniors over age 65. Altogether, somewhere between 10% and 12% of state residents are considered impoverished, depending on the metric.

Poverty in Connecticut declined during the COVID-19 pandemic when the federal government expanded the social safety net but has increased since, as those programs ended. Accordingly, the state has seen increases in homelessness, food insecurity and other forms of hardship.

$42,896

This was the average gap in median household income between white and Latino Connecticut adults in 2024. White households made more than $103,000 while Latino households made just over $60,000. The gap was similar between white and Black households, who averaged just shy of $63,000.

Economic inequality typically correlates with racial inequality, and Connecticut is no exception. Census data shows Asian and white residents earn far higher annual incomes than Black and Latino residents.

Connecticut also has been found to have one of the nation’s largest wealth gaps, with Black and Latino residents having far higher rates of poverty and lower rates of homeownership.

10

More than 50% of Connecticut’s non-white residents live in just 10 of the state’s 169 towns. Nearly 30 towns in the state are more than 90% white, according to the 2020 Census.

A 2024 Connecticut Housing and Segregation study by the state’s data and policy analytics department found that Connecticut remains one of the most racially and economically segregated states in the nation.

In many cases, Census data shows, bordering towns are sharply segregated. For example, 67% of Waterbury’s population is non-white, but neighboring towns Wolcott, Plymouth, Watertown, Thomaston and Middlebury all have non-white populations of less than 15%.

$34.54

A Connecticut resident must make $34.54 an hour to comfortably afford a typical two-bedroom apartment in the state, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. That’s the 11th highest hourly rate of any state.

That means someone earning the state minimum wage of $16.35 an hour would have to work over 68 hours a week to afford a modest one-bedroom rental and more than 84 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom, the NLIHC calculates.

Because housing in Connecticut is so expensive, residents often spend far more on rent than experts recommend. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 34% of households in the state put 30% or more of their household income toward housing costs, meaning they qualify as “rent-burdened.”

That number is much higher in poorer cities, such as Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport, where about half the population spends 30% or more of their income on rent — as compared to less than a third of the population in neighboring suburbs like West Hartford, Woodbridge and Fairfield.

45

White fourth graders in Connecticut outperform their Black peers in math proficiency by 45 percentage points. They outpaced their Hispanic peers by 36 percentage points. Connecticut has some of the highest proficiency gaps between white students and students of color in the nation, across grade levels and school subjects.

In Connecticut, school funding largely comes from the municipal level, through local property taxes. Because of that, schools in poorer communities can see significantly different funding levels than schools in affluent areas, often leading to differences in opportunities and performance.

In Bridgeport, where fewer than half of students are white and more than 90% are classified as high-need, the district spent $18,922 per pupil in 2023-24, according to state data. That same year, the Greenwich school system, where most students are white and only about a third are “high-need,” spent $27,791 per pupil.

Unsurprisingly, these districts also saw significant performance disparities. In Greenwich, more than 70% of students met or exceeded standards on both the English Language Arts and the math portion of the Smarter Balanced

Assessment in 2023-24, according to state data. But in Bridgeport, fewer than 20% met or exceeded those same standards.

Editor’s note: This is part four in a five-part series examining inequality in Connecticut.

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