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Subsidy-Choked Hartford


Whaler0718

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Why does everybody villify the suburbs? Shouldn't somebody who educates themselves and gets a good job be able to afford - and deserve - more than an uneducated individual? People want a sense of community and tend to gravitate towards people with like interests and pursuits. An investment analyst making 200k/yr is not going to live on Homestead Ave, but in a suburban neighborhood populated by other likeminded and educated individuals. I currently live in downtown hartford, but prefer the burbs to living here for numerous reasons including; taxes, unresponsive PD, crime - I have had friend's cars get broke infront of my building on Trumbull St and cars have been stolen from the 'locked' parking garage attached to my building, one of the worst school systems in the state with no more than 36% of students meeting goal on state mastery tests and, a sense of community I can identify with. As more than 30% of the city lives below the poverty line, I don't fit in outside of the 6 or so square blocks of downtown. Hartford does not have the feeling of boston or NY with each neighborhood being tightknitt, at least not downtown anyways.
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Why does everybody villify the suburbs? Shouldn't somebody who educates themselves and gets a good job be able to afford - and deserve - more than an uneducated individual? People want a sense of community and tend to gravitate towards people with like interests and pursuits. An investment analyst making 200k/yr is not going to live on Homestead Ave, but in a suburban neighborhood populated by other likeminded and educated individuals. I currently live in downtown hartford, but prefer the burbs to living here for numerous reasons including; taxes, unresponsive PD, crime - I have had friend's cars get broke infront of my building on Trumbull St and cars have been stolen from the 'locked' parking garage attached to my building, one of the worst school systems in the state with no more than 36% of students meeting goal on state mastery tests and, a sense of community I can identify with. As more than 30% of the city lives below the poverty line, I don't fit in outside of the 6 or so square blocks of downtown. Hartford does not have the feeling of boston or NY with each neighborhood being tightknitt, at least not downtown anyways.
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I villify the suburbs because they have destroyed the cities that spawned them.

Take your example of Boston and New York and their tightknitt communities. The reason that those cities have survived the exodus to the suburbs is because of their critical mass. They are so big that even with a flood of people moving out, there were enough educated and wealthy people left in the city to keep many of its neighborhoods safe and desirable.

That exodus--which has killed most American cities--was spurred less by inner city problems than by government subsidies of oil, cars, roads and through accellerated depreciation, cheap, new buildings. It made economic sense to build in greenways because the government made doing so cheaper than rennovating existing structures. So it was the upper middle class that went first because they could buy houses in the burbs for next to nothing! The wealthiest soon followed because the growing disparity between wealth and poverty was too much to stomach--off to the burbs where everybody's wealthy!

Also, Hartford doesn't have one of the worst school systems in the state. It has one of the worst performing. I will never understand why people measure how good a school is based on how its students perform when student performance is tied to so many factors beyond the school, namely, their parents, their parents background, their peers, etc. I promise that if we conducted an experiment where Avon high school students attended HPHS for a year and Hartford students attended Avon that the test scores of each school would change to reflect the students who attend it.

And, finally, if you want a sense of community, move to the West End. I meet so many people in Elizabeth Park who are educated (lawyers, insurance execs, real estate agents, and artists) and relatively well off and genuinely interesting. Oh, and I actually meet them and talk to them--and we share a sense community--unlike folks I know in their mcmansions on 2 acres in places where if you're caught walking on the sidewalk, you must be poor. That, or your Mercedes has broken down and you need a lift! What a way to live, really.

Oh, and by the way, residential taxes in Hartford are actually below many of the suburbs because of depressed assessment--20% of FMV versus 70%, so while the mill rate is much higher, the actual figure of taxes paid is the same or lower than what you'd pay in the burbs, so leave that off your list of reasons to move.

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Oh, and by the way, residential taxes in Hartford are actually below many of the suburbs because of depressed assessment--20% of FMV versus 70%, so while the mill rate is much higher, the actual figure of taxes paid is the same or lower than what you'd pay in the burbs, so leave that off your list of reasons to move.
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I think your statement is misleading. Hartford's taxes are based on 70% FMV just like other municipalities. However, we've deferred revaluations for a couple of years, which means the mill rate has been charged to an out of date value. A lot of other suburbs deferred their revals too. I believe our current reval will take effect in 2008, so values will go way up, but then the mill rate should be adjusted downward in response. I don't think the new mill rate has been announced yet.

More important than this though from a resident perspective is that equivalent property is going to be valued less in Hartford neighborhoods than in adjacent suburbs, so the taxes should be lower too. The property that I own right now is assessed at about 30% FMV and will soon go up to 70%, but if I owned the same property in West Hartford, 70% of its FMV would be about 110% of my Hartford FMV, so I'm coming out ahead in that respect.

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I promise you, they did the reval in 2006 and are assessing at 23.104% of FMV. See Public Act 06-183. This depresses the grand list, which raises the mill rate. Since businesses will continue to be assessed at 70%, they get hit hard. The mill rate, according to the assessor's office, would be about 58 mills under the current budget. Mr Perez has announced a budget increase, so that rate will probably pass the 60 mill mark.
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