Quite Beautiful, but Isolated, no transportation,
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1/30/2009
Like many of the mid sized towns in CT, Newtown is facing its share of challenges. It got too built during the housing bubble to qualify as rural. It is too provincial and isolated to qualify as a real town. With two working parents required, the driving burdens imposed by children's activities added to the commuting requirements of working leave a family too exhausted to do much more than look out the window on the weekend.
The nearest train stations are ten miles away in different directions. There is no bus transportation. There are no taxis. If you stubbornly insist on having only one car, and it is in the shop, you are trapped. Likewise, your teenagers. If they would like to take a trip to New Haven or New York on a Saturday and your car is in the shop, there is no way to do it. Trapped. This gets very old, very quickly.
On the plus side, it is pretty. If you bring your own job and money, and are able and happy to pursue life intently within a narrow geography, Newtown is a very good place to be. It is not as expensive or built up as Westport or Stamford, and does not have Westport pretensions.
On the negative side, housing is expensive by nationwide standards, including Boston and California, with few compensating benefits. By nationwide standards, the schools are mediocre. There is heroin traffic in the high school, with established supply lines to Bridgeport, which has proven stubbornly resistant to eradication. The peer group tolerates it. There is little private sector work closer than ninety minutes door to door. Thanks to burgeoning public sector payrolls, property taxes have doubled over the past five years.
The public sector workers tend to be local wives, working in the area to free up Dad for the daily three hour trek to White Plains, Stamford or Hartford, or five hour trek to New York. In the certain event of a job loss, Mom's paycheck is not going to do it. It really does take two full time incomes to live here.
The elephant on the table: if one person loses a job, how are you ever going to get out? Connecticut has had net out migration for the past ten years. There is little demand for the standard house at the New England price, not even considering the property tax burden. If you overcome an aversion to moving, in reality there is decreasing demand for the typical corporate staff type. The areas which may have had demand are increasingly distant. Companies who are still hiring in Boston, Austin, Atlanta or Silicon Valley have a surplus of local candidates who are -- frankly, in the context of moving in a larger world -- sharper. On the numbers, there is no need to import a CT staffer with corporate relocation. You are stuck.
It can be done. I did my research, planned carefully for a long time, and left for an area with greater vitality and opportunity. My children left for college. We are content, in a warmer climate with greater prosperity and mobility. None of us has gone back to visit.
jane | Newtown, CT