The Best Small Cities In Connecticut: New Report

CONNECTICUT — The growth of big cities in the U.S. has begun to slow, and urban core counties are experiencing population declines for the first time in a decade. The spotlight is now shifting to the suburbs and smaller cities. Few states handle that kind of urban/suburban planning better than Connecticut.

Personal finance site WalletHub developed metrics and a methodology for gauging the quality of these not-quite-Gothams, and named 22 smallConnecticut cities to their list, with four in the top 200.

WalletHub compared more than 1,300 U.S. cities with populations between 25,000 and 100,000 based on 43 key indicators of livability. The decision points ranged from housing costs to school-system quality to restaurants per capita. 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 cities by percentile. The 99th percentile represents the top 1 percent of small cities in America. Westport placed in the top 3 percent of all small U.S. cities in the survey, with an overall score of 68. Shelton is in the top 9 percent, and scored a 66. Stratford, Trumbull, Norwalk, Wethersfield, West Hartford, Naugatuck, Milford and Manchester round out the Nutmeg State's top 10 small cities, according to WalletHub.

The future predicted for most of Connecticut's small cities is bright. Like just about everything else, the experts say it's COVID-19 related.

The Brookings Institute is predicting the "national dispersal away from large metropolitan area populations" will be a long-term affair. The analysts there also point toward the housing market in the last half of the 2010s. That real estate boom gave millennials the wherewithal to find jobs and homes in suburbs not available to them in the immediate aftermath of the 2007 to 2009 Great Recession.

Zeenat Kotval-K, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University's School of Planning, Design and Construction, foresees nothing but the best for small cities — provided they prepare for the worst:

"I predict small cities will grow in popularity provided they can define their place in their regions, adapt to the new normal by creating a sharing and supportive social structure, and dynamically preparing themselves for future game-changing events whether medical, environmental, or economic. Their planners must embrace disaster planning as they move forward," Kotval-K said.

To be sure, the outlook of every urban researcher is not as rosy. Katrin Anacker, professor of public policy at the Schar School of Policy and Government in George Mason University, warns small city Chambers of Commerce not to get used to popping champagne bottle corks just yet. History favors a messy reset:

"After 09/11, there was a large exodus from Manhattan yet after a few years, most people had returned," Anacker said. "During the global COVID-19 pandemic, most office workers were able to pivot in-person to online meetings. The question is whether these office workers will remain remote workers for good or will become hybrid or in-person workers again. It could well be that only a few workers will continue to work remotely. Thus, it remains to be seen whether small cities will remain popular with people who moved there because of the pandemic."