If West Florissant Avenue is the epicenter for the Ferguson, Mo., uprisings, then Hartford's Albany and Prospect avenues are our racial and economic fault lines. My family and I are from the St. Louis area and we have called Hartford home for more than 15 years.
A portrait in black and white shows housing projects, mansions and foster homes for black and brown children flanking Hartford's city line. Economic injustice and racism have been carving canyons for years.
After the Civil War, Hartford was one of the wealthiest American cities, with booming industrial production. Now Hartford is one of the poorest American cities in one of the richest states. Real estate, public transit and industry continue to sort our neighborhoods into affluent suburbs and neglected urban communities. Police and government reinforce these divisions. Residents 83 percent of whom are black or Latino are living in a trap built by racism and inequality. Let's examine some facts:
Blacks, not so long ago, were legally cut out of suburbia. The deeds for some properties in West Hartford had restrictive covenants, preventing black people from purchasing those homes. According to historian James W. Loewen, there is some evidence that Glastonbury and Simsbury were known as "sundown towns," which kept people of color out with signs that read, "Whites Only After Dark."
Hartford is the region's service hub. Almost half of our property (44 percent) is tax exempt government property, colleges, hospitals, houses of worship and schools. Our three hospitals are home to 59 percent of the county's beds, according to the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities. These services, along with the labor, raw materials, first responders and roads that support them, are used by people from all the surrounding towns.
Poverty is seen as a contagious disease to be quarantined, not cured. Average per capita income for Hartford residents is just over $16,000 and half of our capital city's children live in poverty, according to the Census Bureau. This poses a greater threat to tens of thousands of our children than terrorism and mass shootings.
Housing costs stack the deck against economic mobility in Hartford. The city's property tax rate is the highest in Connecticut. Homeowners in Hartford pay roughly the same tax on a single-family house as they would in West Hartford, according to the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities. Further, the National Low-Income Housing Coalition estimates that individuals have to earn almost $48,000 per year or, if they earn minimum wage, work 96 hours a week to pay Hartford's fair market rent.
Many suburbanites are unaware that they are benefiting economically from many of these conditions. Meanwhile, Hartford residents live amid the sometimes toxic rubble left in the wake of wealth extraction. These imbalances have depleted Greater Hartford, stunted our development, shortened the lives of city residents and trapped communities of black and brown people.
On Oct. 5, 100 people of faith from all over Greater Hartford stood on the city line to protest these conditions. Twelve were arrested for trying to break the poverty quarantine. Many of the demonstrators were part of Moral Monday CT, which is a black-led movement for racial justice and is in Hartford because, as Martin Luther King Jr. said in Birmingham, "injustice is here," and because Hartford is the capital city, a wealthy insurance city and one of the poorest and most chocolate cities in America.
About 123,000 people commute into Hartford every day from surrounding towns. Hartford has the 25th highest number of out-of-town commuters in the nation for a city its size, according to the Connecticut Economic Research Center. If even half of those folks would stand with us, we could break the quarantine that constrains a sense of shared destiny between Hartford and its suburbs. As the Rev. King said, "We are caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny."
