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September 20, 2021

Apartment construction helps drive population growth

Photo | HBJ File Bloomfield Planning and Economic-Development Director Jose Giner said tax-break deals are necessary these days.
By Chris Hoffman

The 2020 U.S. Census showed a number of Hartford area towns lost population in the last decade, while others recorded resident increases of more than 5%.

Local officials in towns that grew offered a plethora of reasons, including great schools and convenient locations near Hartford and major highways.

But some of those suburban towns showing population growth share something else in common — a willingness to allow construction of large apartment complexes in what have traditionally been communities dominated by single-family homes.

Could this be another factor in their frothier demographic profiles?

Absolutely, said Bloomfield Director of Planning and Economic Development Jose Giner. He attributed much, if not most, of the town’s more than 4% population increase from 2010 to 2020 to the hundreds of new apartments built in town over the last decade.

Giner cited as an example Heirloom Flats, which features about 200 market-rate apartments in downtown Bloomfield. A key feature of these new developments is amenities — everything from golf simulators to state-of-the-art gyms — and the inclusion of retail and restaurant space, he said.

“I would imagine it’s a lot of young people working from home in the biotech or other industries,” Giner said of residents of Heirloom Flats and similar complexes in Bloomfield. “A lot of young people don’t want the burden of a home with a high mortgage, not when they will not be around in four or five years. A lot of it is amenity-driven. These developments are amenities rich.”

Rocky Hill, which at 5.7% had Greater Hartford’s largest population jump over the last decade, saw the addition of 300 apartments during that time, and is teed up to see about 200 more in a recently proposed mixed-use development.

While Rocky Hill Director of Economic Development Raymond Carpentino said he thinks apartments had at best a modest impact on the town’s population, he called them a vital part of the town’s overall economic development effort. Not only do they bring in population, they also drive business expansion when paired with retail and restaurant space and become big taxpayers, providing a significant net benefit, he said.

“Retail follows business, particularly for downtown areas,” Carpentino said. “Where you have a density of people, you will find an increase in commercial activity.”

But apartment construction is not a universal panacea for falling population and a stagnant grand list. Hartford added more than 2,000 apartments to its downtown core in the last decade but still saw its population decrease.

Quinnipiac University Professor Emeritus David Cadden said that’s part of a pattern. Apartments clearly goose population and economic growth in suburbia, but that’s not necessarily the case in cities, he said.

“Nobody has locked down the special sauce to assure growth in cities,” Cadden said.

University of Connecticut Professor Fred Carstensen, director of the school’s Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis, said it’s to be expected that more apartments are being built in suburban towns. The state, he said, never fully recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. Many high-paying jobs disappeared only to be replaced by positions that paid significantly less, he said.

As a result, fewer people make enough to buy a home, pushing them into the rental market and creating new demand for apartments, Carstensen said. To illustrate his point, Carstensen noted the state averaged about 14,000 building permits a year, mostly for single-family homes, during the boom of the 1980s. That has fallen to just 4,000 in recent years, virtually all for multifamily units.

“There are more apartments because the quality of jobs in Connecticut that have been created (since the 2008 recession) are relatively low wage and skill,” he said. “[People who took the new job] can’t afford houses.”

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