Two Connecticuts: How gaps between rich and poor define life in CT

CT Insider – Monday, May 19, 2025
By Alex Putterman

WATERBURY – There’s a stereotype about Connecticut, one that pops up frequently in pop culture. You’ve probably heard it.

The state is one big, gilded suburb. It’s all prep schools and trust funds. Garden parties and country clubs. Boat shoes and pastel shorts.

If there’s truth to that image, though, you probably shouldn’t tell Barbara Dublin. Dublin has spent 30 years as executive director of Greater Waterbury Interfaith Ministries, a soup kitchen and food pantry serving some of Connecticut’s neediest residents. And she says she’s rarely seen things as bad as they are today.

“The need right now is profound,” Dublin says on a frigid late January day, bundled in a thick coat as she distributes groceries from a folding table. “We are serving so many more needy families, children. There’s not enough food.”

A man approaches the table, and Dublin greets him warmly, before reeling off some lunch options: fish, beef, ham, peanut butter and jelly. The man makes his selections, takes his food and carries on.

“I think it’s important that they have that option to shop, like in Stop & Shop or Shop Rite or Big Y,” Dublin says. “Because it gives them the respect that they deserve.”

Leafy suburbs are part of Connecticut’s story, of course, but so are scenes like this, which play out daily across the state. Yes, Connecticut has extreme wealth — with an estimated 130,000 millionaire households as of 2019 and at least 16 billionaires as of this year — but it’s also home to approximately 360,400 people in poverty, including 79,170 children.

In fact, data shows, few places in the United States have inequality quite like Connecticut’s, where extreme wealth and extreme struggle coexist in startling proximity.

There’s Hartford, one of America’s poorest cities, whose lowest-income neighborhoods are just minutes from wealthy suburbs such as West Hartford and Glastonbury. There’s Bridgeport, with a median household income of $41,047, a few towns over from Darien and New Canaan, with median household incomes above $170,000 and legions of multi-millionaire residents.

As of 2023, Connecticut tied for second among all states in a measure of inequality called the Gini coefficient, narrowly behind New York.

And whereas New York is a large and diffuse state, whose poorest counties sit hours away from its richest ones, Connecticut is a small one, where great wealth and great poverty often persist mere miles away from each other.

It’s this combination of disparity and proximity that leads advocates and experts to consider Connecticut something like the nation’s inequality capital.

“Poverty is a problem everywhere, in every state and every country in the world at different levels,” said Constanza Segovia, organizing director of the advocacy group Connecticut For All. “The thing we have here is, how can we have that level of wealth living next door to that level of poverty?”

In 2018, the Economic Policy Institute compared all 50 states, as well as counties and metro areas, based on the ratio of income for the top 1% and the bottom 99%, finding Connecticut to be the third most unequal, behind only New York and Florida. According to their analysis, the top 1% in Connecticut averaged more than $2.5 million in annual earnings at the time — more than 37 times what the bottom 99% of residents made.

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 more than $6.2 million a year, 62 times what the bottom 99% earned. Among all counties, Fairfield County ranked 12th more unequal nationally by this metric, while Litchfield, New Haven and Hartford Counties also ranked in the top quintile.

“You have Greenwich and New Canaan physically quite close to Bridgeport,” said Connecticut Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, a New Haven Democrat who has made inequality a focus of his decades-long legislative tenure. “Whereas they might as well be on a different planet economically.”

And because race and socioeconomic status are often closely intertwined, Connecticut also ranks among the states with the largest racial wealth and income gaps, with annual earnings 57% higher for white people than for Black people and 75% higher for white people than for Hispanic people.

Inequality shows up in most aspects of Connecticut life, from education to housing to health to recreation to criminal justice. For those at the top of the socioeconomic spectrum, it means quaint neighborhoods and second homes, top-shelf education, robust public services and strong health care. For those at the bottom, it means food and housing insecurity, failing schools, lack of access to care and, often, an outsized presence of law enforcement in their lives.

The result, some advocates say, is two separate Connecticuts, so close to each other geographically and yet so far from each other in so many other ways.

“When you’re in your own bubble, you don’t actually realize what’s happening in other communities,” said Ayesha Clarke, executive director of Health Equity Solutions, a Hartford-based non-profit. “Even if they’re a mile away.”

Different lenses on inequality

CT Insider interviewed more than 30 people about inequality in Connecticut, as part of a five-part series on the subject. And though not everyone saw the issue exactly the same way or agreed on what should be done about it, most acknowledged the gap between rich and poor as a problem worth reckoning with.

Gov. Ned Lamont, himself a wealthy businessman from Greenwich, framed the topic in terms of opportunity. He said he wants Connecticut residents to feel they can get a good education, find a fulfilling job, buy a home and maybe start their own business, so as to “build wealth from the bottom up.”

“A lot of people just don’t think they have that opportunity,” said Lamont, a Democrat.

Erin Stewart, the Republican mayor of New Britain and a possible candidate for governor in 2026, described the gap between rich and poor as a “huge issue” facing the state, deserving of attention from lawmakers.

“You have achievement gaps, you have wealth gaps, you have the haves vs. the have-nots,” Stewart said. “Connecticut is personified as this very rich, wealthy state, and while we may be, by the average wealth of the average Connecticut resident, you have many residents in Connecticut’s cities who are not wealthy by any means.”

That doesn’t mean there weren’t any dissenting opinions. Some argued inequality isn’t itself meaningful, that although the state should take care of its poorest residents, there’s nothing wrong with the ultra-wealthy coexisting alongside middle- and working-class neighbors.

After all, Connecticut’s near-nation-worst inequality is driven more by extreme wealth than by extreme poverty — its poverty rate is actually sixth-lowest in the country.

Jered Bruzas, chief impact officer at the United Way of Greater Waterbury, said he doesn’t blame Connecticut’s wealthy for the struggles of the state’s poor. As he sees it, “haves” and “have-nots” don’t have to be in conflict.

“We’re fortunate to have the ‘haves’ because the ‘haves’ are some of the most generous people in the area,” Bruzas said. “So many of the organizations that we work with are relying on the folks that have means to be able to provide financial support for their programming.”

Fred Carstensen, a professor of economy and finance at the University of Connecticut, sees the issue several different ways. On one hand, he said, inequality is bad if it leaves people on the bottom struggling. On the other hand, he doesn’t necessarily consider the gap between rich and poor an inherent problem.

“It’s just not a salient issue,” Carstensen said of inequality. “I wish we could deal with it more effectively than we do, but it’s far less important than dealing with the issue of poverty.”

Ultimately, though, most people CT Insider interviewed agreed that inequality in Connecticut has reached concerning levels. They described a psychic cost to steep disparities between “haves” and “have-nots,” as well as a missed opportunity to use Connecticut’s great wealth for the benefit of all its citizens.

Jessica Kubicki, chief initiative officer at the Housing Collective, a Bridgeport-based non-profit, often feels this way as she drives through glamorous suburbs on her way to visit a homeless shelter.

“It feels very confusing and feels very unjust,” Kubicki said, “especially to those who are working, trying, fighting tooth-and-nail to dig out of the circumstance that they are in.”

To Looney, it’s harder to stomach rising homelessness or struggling schools knowing the state has the wealth — and the tax base — to do something about it. He and other Democrats in the state legislature have, with mixed success, pushed over the years to make Connecticut’s tax code more progressive, while strengthening the state’s social safety net.

“We do have the resources here in Connecticut,” Looney said.

Meghan Holden, from the non-profit Connecticut Project advocacy group, argued the state has generally failed to take the issue seriously enough, allowing it to fester and worsen, with real human consequences.

“Connecticut really has deferred conversations about inequality for a long time,” Holden said. “And that does show in the stats and the data.”

Inequality in all areas

Indeed, Connecticut’s inequality shows up in all sorts of facts and figures, across nearly all facets of life in the state.

Take education, for example. Greenwich’s school district spends 46% more per student than Bridgeport’s, despite receiving far less state and federal assistance and despite educating a more advantaged student body with fewer needs. And whereas some of the state’s wealthiest districts employ one certified teacher for every 11 students, many of its poorest school systems can afford only one teacher for every 14 students.

Partly due to these gaps, 20 high schools in Connecticut suburbs rank among the 1,000 best in the country according to U.S. News and World Report (whose methodology includes college readiness, standardized test performance, graduation rate and more), while schools in the state’s cities rank among the nation’s worst by the same measure.

“The town that you live in (determines) the education that you get, and it’s so drastically different,” said Segovia, from the Connecticut For All coalition. “It’s almost like your property taxes are your private-school tuition.”

When researchers analyzed thousands of adjacent school systems across the U.S., comparing the median household income of one district against the other, they found Connecticut was home to 23 of the top 300 most unequal borders in the country, including eight of the top 100.

How about housing? Home prices for prospective renters and buyers have soared to unprecedented levels in Connecticut, to the point where someone must earn $34.54 an hour to afford a two-bedroom rental, 11th highest of any state, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. In some major cities, as many as half of residents are “cost-burdened,” meaning they spend at least 30% of their income on housing.

In a state where some residents purchase million-dollar starter homes, homelessness has risen three straight years, leaving more than 3,000 people living on the street or in shelters at a given time. One recent survey found that 40% of Connecticut adults are “just getting by” and that 12% lacked money to pay for adequate housing in the past year.

Poor people in Connecticut also have dramatically worse health outcomes, one 2023 report showed, with people who make less than $30,000 a year reporting far higher levels of asthma, obesity, anxiety and depression than those with higher incomes, and residents of poor cities reporting higher levels of cancer, kidney disease, heart disease and drug overdoses than those in suburbs.

Clarke, from Health Equity Solutions, notes that she and other Hartford residents sometimes must visit a nearby suburb to find nutritious grocery options.

“Yes, we are one of the wealthiest states, and we’re one of the healthiest states,” Clarke said. “However, if we really look deep, we do have a lot of inequities.”

The list of disparities goes on. Connecticut’s poorest residents face rising food insecurity and greater transportation challenges and are more vulnerable to effects of climate change. People in Connecticut’s poorest cities are also far more likely to be arrested and incarcerated than their wealthier neighbors.

Local recreational services such as swimming pools and youth sports leagues are more difficult to find in poorer communities, whose schools then tend to perform worse in high school sports competitions. Even when good programs exist in low-income places, residents there may be unable to afford them or lack the transportation to access them.

Don Wilson, founder and executive director of Bridgeport Youth Lacrosse, sees this divide on the faces of his young athletes when they visit wealthy suburbs.

“When we take kids out of town and they go to these other towns and they see the quality of the facilities, they’re blown away,” Wilson said. “They go into the gyms and see the resources there, and they’re blown away.”

The past and future of inequality

So how did Connecticut become a national capital of inequality? Andy Horowitz, a UConn professor and the state’s official historian, argues the state — like everywhere else in the U.S. — has always had rigid hierarchies based on race, gender and class, dating back to colonial times.

These dynamics persisted in some form through the Industrial Revolution, when poor workers toiled for the benefits of wealthy industrialists, and into the 20th century, when federal policy helped establish the modern suburbs and Fairfield County began to attract finance executives commuting into New York City.

As has been the case nationwide, Connecticut’s inequality has mostly become more extreme in recent decades. After hovering near an all-time low from the 1950s through 1970s, income inequality spiked in the ’80s and has trended upward ever since. For much of the 2010s, the share of income captured by the state’s top 1% approached three times the level seen in the ’70s.

Along the way, Horowitz notes, public officials made deliberate policy choices that created the state we live in today, in ways both good and bad. The income tax introduced in 1991, for example, generated additional revenue to be spent on social services but also included advantages for the financial industry.

Even today, Connecticut ranks among the bottom half of states (and last in the Northeast) in progressive taxation, according to one 2024 report, with a tax code that exacerbates inequality instead of reducing it.

“The most important thing history shows is that these are human choices,” Horowitz said. “There’s nothing natural or inevitable about inequalities.”

If human choices create inequality, then they can also alleviate it. Those interviewed for this story offered a range of large and small actions Connecticut could take to reduce inequality: higher taxes on wealthy residents and corporations, greater investment in education and social services, housing policies that make the state more affordable, greater sharing of services between rich communities and poor ones, and more.

Though a problem as far-reaching and deeply ingrained as inequality resists any quick or easy solution, Holden says the state can begin by facing the issue head on and treating it with the urgency she believes it deserves. That means thinking big about the problem and making an earnest effort at improving housing, health care and cost-of-living for everyone in the state.

Otherwise, she argues, Connecticut will be failing not only its current residents but also its future ones.

“Inequality becomes generational. It’s a cycle. It’s something that passes down from parents to children,” Holden said. “And it’s very hard to break out of.”

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

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