The Best Small Cities In Connecticut: 2022 Report

CONNECTICUT — The United States may be a land of extremes, but when it comes to choosing where we live, Americans favor small cities over both teeming metropolises and rural expanses.

Personal finance site WalletHub developed metrics and a methodology for gauging the quality of these not-quite-Gothams, and named 20 small Connecticut cities to their list, with 11 in the top 500.

WalletHub compared more than 1,300 U.S. cities with populations between 25,000 and 100,000 based on 43 key metrics of livability. The decision points ranged from housing costs to school-system quality to restaurants per capita. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the most favorable conditions for small-city residents.

The full methodology, including how much weight was ascribed to each category, can be found online here.

Given the large sample of cities ranked in this study, WalletHub grouped results by percentile. The 99th percentile represents the top 1 percent of small cities in America. Stratford placed in the top 4 percent of all small U.S. cities in the survey, with an overall score of 67. Shelton is in the top 8 percent, and scored a 66. Norwalk, Trumbull, Naugatuck, Milford, Manchester, West Hartford, Danbury and Middletown round out the Nutmeg State's top 10 small cities, according to WalletHub.

At the top of the list are Lancaster, PA; Carmel, IN; Fair Lawn, NJ; Lexington, MA and Brentwood, TN. From Connecticut, only Stratford made it into the Top 100.

Sonia Hirt, dean of the College of Environment + Design at the University of Georgia, said that getting cozy with small city life is a matter of embracing tradeoffs: "You end up having far more cash, usually, but have access to fewer cultural opportunities. Less car traffic but also no mass transit."

COVID-19 tossed many Americans into small cities and suburbs whether they preferred the experience or not. Now that the masks are off, will the bloom fall from the small city rose as well?

"I do not believe we know what the long-term effects of the pandemic are on mass psychology. Initially, evidence suggests that small towns are perceived as more attractive. But whether this is long-term, I do not know," Hirt said.