Transactions are Still Happening in Commercial Real Estate

It was hard to know a month ago, when we closed our physical offices, what would happen to our sales.  We aren't saying that there isn't a big dip, but it seems to be mostly from the lack of listings, in some categories.  That is, fewer listings are coming onto the market, and therefore there is less inventory to sell.  When properties do get listed, they get looked at online, and they get seen in person, and they sell.  That's not always true, but it is notable.

One reason is that we've known for a while that many businesses were short of space, but not pulling the trigger on more.  Now, some of those decision makers have time to look, to evaluate, and to buy.  We have seen that in sectors unaffected by the pandemic.  In the case of industries at the forefront of the current situation, they can be growing rapidly.  Doesn't everyone wish that Zoom were based in Connecticut?

Another contributing factor is the knowledge that some of this change is probably permanent.  Not only will more people meet virtually, those who are buying and having the goods delivered are getting used to that way of life.  In the sphere of commercial real estate, that calls for more warehouse space.  I've written before about our location between NY and Boston, as well as our own demand, due to the relative lack of retail here, compared to other markets.  Recently, we listed a warehouse near I95, and it went under contract in three days, after several showings.  It didn't surprise us, but it may surprise some people, who may feel that the country is in a state of suspense, with no forward movement.  Actually, smart businesspeople are positioning themselves for the changes coming with reopening.

Finally, rates are low, and the stock market is volatile.  That combination often leads to a boom in real estate.  Let's hope so.

Investment Real Estate Still Strong

For all of the complaints of businesspeople about Connecticut, it remains a place in which people want to invest.  There are many reasons for this.  One is that most investors tend to invest close to home, maybe because it's easier to take care of details when the property is close by, and maybe because they know more about values in their own vicinity.

Another reason is that there are specific opportunities in our region.  For example, New Haven has a robust rental housing market, with thousands of students, and a population that includes 62% renters.  Despite all the building, conversion, and development of rental housing over the past decade, inventory keeps disappearing. Much the same is true of warehouse space, based upon our proximity to Boston and NYC.

Prices remain low in our area, especially, again, compared with our neighboring states.  Although prices for residential property rose 7% in January, over the January before, there are still bargains to be had.

We have a strong vacation home market.  Waterside and wooded locations appeal to buyers, because they can be enjoyed, but they can also be rented to others.  Fears about travel will only increase the desirability of locations near major metropolitan areas.

There's a lot of money in Connecticut, and it all needs to find places to go.  Real estate is an attractive opportunity, and one that most people understand and appreciate.

All of this goes to suggest that, if you have property to sell,  you should consider selling it now.  If you are looking to buy, you should do that before the inventory dries up.  Based upon the above list, that might not take too long.

Got Warehouses?

The Town of Trumbull just announced a big warehouse deal by Amazon, who is opening a facility in North Haven also.  Given our proximity to rail, water, NYC, and Boston, we are in demand as a region in an economy of delivery.  Where will the supply come from?  Since not much has been built, and since there is some oversupply in other types of flex space, what was built as office may now become warehouse space.  While not providing the same number of jobs--which may be why Connecticut's 0.2% job growth is well below that of other states nationally and in New England-- such use does bring economic growth to our region.  There's also a spillover effect into transportation and other ancillary sectors.  Beggars can't be choosers.  We have real estate, and distributors have needs.

So, if you have land on which to build storage space, or space that can be converted, this is the time to put it on the market.  There are takers out there.

From the New Haven Register By Dan Haar : Connecticut’s lost decade — and how to avoid a repeat

By Dan Haar, New Haven Register, click to read online

 

 

 

Think back to the first week of 2010.

 

The reigning champion UConn women’s basketball team was steaming toward five more rings in the next seven years. A former Stamford mayor who lost the Democratic primary for governor four years earlier was about to win the seat and hold it for most of the decade.

 

Obamacare was adopted but not yet in place. The Sandy Hook tragedy was three years away. And the Great Recession had hammered Connecticut along with the rest of the nation.

 

As the decade opened, Wall Street had started back upward but Main Street still reeled at rock bottom, facing a tough slog. Exactly ten years later, the nation has recovered heartily and then some, under two presidents.

 

Connecticut? A lost decade by just about every economic measure.

 

A lost decade — and worst of all, we’re not in the clear yet. One more decade like the one that just ended and we are basically western New York, a place with some great assets that’s on the way to someplace else, looking to recapture its old glory.

 

The hopeful news is, we can still avoid another 10-year meltdown. We need some demographic breaks, a solid dose of attitude changes and an embrace of the elusive political middle.

 

Let’s look at the numbers first.

 

A lost chunk of the state

 

Connecticut’s jobs count, the most important measure of how we’re doing, grew by 4 percent in the decade, a total of 66,000 positions if we count annual averages including preliminary 2019 totals through November. By contrast, Massachusetts and the United States both added 15 percent.

 

Those are just numbers. Consider what it really means. If Connecticut had gained jobs at the same rate as the nation, we would have added another 179,000 — enough to support as many households as there are in New Haven, Hartford, Fairfield and Greenwich combined.

 

 

It’s as if we lopped off a hefty chunk of the state, heavily populated by young college graduates. And the housing market reflects that haircut.

 

When the decade started, a single-family house at the median among all sales — where half sold for more and half less — stood at $242,000, in shooting range of the Massachusetts median of $285,000, according to The Warren Group, which tracks house sales. As of 2019, Connecticut was up just 8 percent to $261,000.

 

In Massachusetts, that median house in 2019 fetched an even $400,000 — a 40 percent jump. And although there are no official figures for national median prices, one fastidious website calculates the U.S. gain at 44 percent for the decade.

 

 

What does that mean for the typical Connecticut homeowner? If you owned a house that was worth $350,000 in Connecticut a decade ago, you missed out on $112,000 of price gains that people in Massachusetts and most other states realized in just those ten years. Some parts of Connecticut, notably Fairfield County, fared even worse.

 

Shrinking in an expansion

 

If you’re counting income, we’re still the richest state in average income per person and we’re in the top ten in how much typical families earn. But we’re slipping there, too. That’s harder to measure because the reported numbers bounce around due to small Census sample sizes.

 

We do know this: The biggest picture of all — the total value of goods and services produced — shows Connecticut’s lost decade at its starkest. The total product for Connecticut actually shrank by 0.5 percent, adjusted for inflation, when we compare the average for all of 2009 with the average for the 12 months ending last June, the latest data we hav

 

That’s a shrinking economy after the U.S. recession ended, friends. One slice that meant thousands of livelihoods — the manufacturing of non-durable goods such as food, pharmaceuticals and household items — slipped by almost half, to $6.9 billion a year. The much larger, higher paying finance and insurance sector cratered by 23 percent.

 

Massachusetts, ignited by the allure of Boston and explosive gains in bio-sciences, shot ahead by 20 percent overall even as we shrank. And the nation as a whole, which grew slower than Connecticut from 2005 to the end of 2009, expanded by 19 percent in the decade that just ended.

 

What Connecticut doesn’t have is an unemployment problem, as we track the nation in jobless rates. That’s partly because we don’t have vast tracts of poverty, another strength of Connecticut. And it’s partly that many people just leave if they’re out of work or under-employed. The Census numbers show an average of 24,000 people a year moving to other states over the last five years, making Connecticut the 4th worst in the continental United States, ahead of only Illinois, New York and New Jersey.

 

 

 

 

I’ve studied Connecticut prosperity full-time for four months shy of 25 years as an economics reporter, columnist and business editor. I knew these numbers intellectually. Seeing them all together, calculating them as a decade in the mirror, I feel a punch in the gut, a wistful tear for lost opportunity as a transplanted Connecticut homeowner by choice, an employee in a struggling industry and the father of a newly minted teacher in Boston who’s not coming back.

 

What happened?

 

We’ve argued the causes of Connecticut’s relentless recession from the very start. Tax increases, driven by decades-old debts and obligations, piled up even as former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy cut the size of government by eliminating more than 5,000 state jobs.

 

We’re in the hole by as much as $100 billion including pensions and future health care for public employees, despite restructuring the debts and benefits multiple times. The problem isn’t today’s benefits, though they’re too high for older state employees. It’s that for decades, Democrats and Republicans alike failed to set aside money.

 

Costs for utilities, education, entertainment and health care have climbed as they have in the rest of coastal America. But the perceived value of living in Connecticut didn’t keep pace in large part because we lacked, and still lack, a true magnet city with enough critical mass to attract millennial college graduates.

 

Leafy suburbs unconnected to major cities fell out of favor and the center-cities Connecticut does have are not able to compete with second-tier metros such as Minneapolis, Dallas and Pittsburgh, let alone the giants.

 

 

Manufacturers slowly moved operations to cheaper places. Corporate headquarters, facing profit pressures, retrenched. A few big events bled thousands of jobs, chiefly rising competition for the native American casinos and consolidation in financial services — especially the breakup of General Electric’s GE Capital. That breakup cost 2,700 lucrative jobs, nine times more than the more widely cited but less important exit of GE’s headquarters from Fairfield to Boston in 2016.

 

The Trump-led tax reform of late 2017 didn’t help. Although high-income earners have seen a nice break, the new limit of $10,000 on federal income tax deductions for state and local taxes hurts the entire Northeast, costing Connecticut residents an estimated $2 billion a year.

 

What we have, in short, is a vicious cycle in which people leave or stay away because costs are high in comparison to perceived value, or they leave or stay away because we don’t have any large cities in Connecticut. And that of course drives up costs further because it lowers the tax base. Warren Buffett, the multi-billionaire corporate investor, didn’t help matters by warning people to avoid states with high unfunded liabilities.

 

Rena Carreiro was among those who felt herself moving sideways during the decade. She had worked as an office manager for a manufacturer since 1993. Over the last ten years the business retrenched in Connecticut, moving work elsewhere.

 

Carreiro performed finance, human resources, production control and inventory tasks, taking on more work as people left. “It was wonderful to learn all those new things,” the Waterbury resident said.

 

But there were few opportunities for career advancement. The company — which Carreiro didn’t want to name — closed her plant at the end of 2019. She landed a job at Parker Medical in Bridgewater, a growing company where she has high hopes and new optimism.

 

Solutions

 

Like Rena Carreiro, we as a state can take measures to avoid another lost economic decade. Here’s a 6-point plan:

 

  TAKE A MIDDLE PATH ON POLICY— Democrats and Republicans need to meet in the middle. That means Republicans need to tone down the two-note chorus about taxes and state employee benefits, and help govern like they did briefly in 2017, when the Senate was split 18-18. And it means Democrats must pull back on the throttle for great programs we can’t afford. It’s no coincidence that Massachusetts does well with Republican governors and Democratic legislatures, and the nation does well under centrist presidents such as Bill Clinton. The middle path means Republicans need to stop trashing the unions and Democrats need to stop protecting every iota of their benefits. Modest givebacks on retiree health co-payments and cost-of-living adjustments won’t kill anyone and will help the state. And the middle path means pushing hard for efficiency gains in government at the state and especially in cities and towns, where property taxes are way too high.

 

  SHOW SOME CONNECTICUT PRIDE — Yeah, that was the name of a basketball team but it’s hard to find a place that trashes itself as much as we do in this state. Knock it off. You know who you are. Connecticut has great education, access to mountains, oceans and countryside and a lot of smart and innovative people. We have good cities, not great ones, with truly notable food and music, and access — there’s that word again — to two of the greatest cities in the world. Lack of growth has left us more open space and less sprawl. Enjoy it. Get psyched. Work hard, play hard and stop feeding the collective depression. It’s a small state, go make something happen.

 

  EMBRACE RISK — What do finance, insurance and defense manufacturing have in common? They’re all built around controlling risk. That’s what we do and it shows in the personality of the state. When it comes to business, we need the culture of put-it-out-there enterprise that seems to make no sense, like Amazon, Facebook, Tesla and Microsoft at their founding. We had it in the 19th and early 20th centuries and lost it.

 

  MARKET TO IMMIGRANTS AND YOUNG PARENTS - That’s our sweet spot because it’s more about education and family than urban lifestyle. Connecticut does welcome immigrants in contrast to Trump’s America and that can help us. We do have a good record of attracting people in their 30s. We need to reach those groups more actively with targeted campaigns.

 

  KEEP WORKING ON CITIES AND TRANSPORTATION - Connecticut will never compete on price with North Dakota and Mississippi, nor should we try. Building the place up matters even though it costs money. It’s working in Stamford.

 

  LET EQUILIBRIUM HAPPEN -- State Sen. Matt Lesser, D-Middletown, thinks it’s fine that houses are not overvalued. More opportunity for buyers, he says. It’s a matter of balance and equilibrium. At some point, millennial professionals might figure out that living in a great house in Milford or New Haven’s East Rock neighborhood, with a 15-minute commute, beats five to an apartment in Brooklyn and two hours a day on the subway. That may mean house prices have to fall even further, which sucks for us homeowners. But it’s a path that will work. Embracing equilibrium means understanding that bike lanes in and out of cities, and saving historic landmarks such as the Sanborn Library in Bridgeport, which was tragically demolished in August, will add up.

 

The cul-de-sac

 

Following a balanced path leaves plenty of room for debate over whether we more urgently need to cut taxes — the Republican solution — or, as Democrats insist, increase value by adding amenities to make the state more hospitable.

 

The same argument unfolds issue by issue: paid family and medical leave, a $15 minimum wage, housing subsidies for the poor, housing subsidies for the rich (yeah, apartments in Hartford at a cost of tens of millions for state taxpayers), corporate handouts, expanded Medicaid and on and on. In each one, there is a middle path of compromise that get too little attention. Paid family and medical leave, for example, is too rich a program, too soon, although it’s worthy.

 

All the while, we lost a decade.

 

Twenty-one years ago, a regional economic report warned that Connecticut was in danger of becoming a “cul-de-sac,” an economic dead-end, in part because it lacked “dynamism” in the coming century of urbanization and globalization. Hmmm.

 

“Right now investment is bypassing the state and we have become in many respects that cul-de-sac,” said Donald Klepper-Smith, a longtime economist who has, as of 2020, entered semi-retirement and moved to Massachusetts and South Carolina.

 

Klepper-Smith’s view: We need leadership and strategy to achieve fiscal discipline. “I don’t think it gets fixed in my lifetime because I don’t think we have the political will to fix it,” he said.

 

I’m more optimistic but only slightly. But there are many fronts in this war. Clearly, after the lost decade Connecticut just endured, there is no more wiggle room.

 

Rich Dupont, a manufacturing consultant, is helping the community college system, especially at Housatonic in Bridgeport, train machinists for the thousands of open jobs in advanced manufacturing that will disappear if qualified people don’t materialize. What he says about that battle also applies to the entire state economy.

 

“We are teetering on the edge.”

 

A State Full of Warehouses

There's been a lot of talk about the aborted Amazon deal in Queens, and many commentaries on the pros and cons of the decision.  Let's not lose sight of the fact that we have a big--gigantic, even--warehouse going up in North Haven.  Although distribution centers lack the glamour of headquarters buildings, and admittedly have many fewer employees per square foot, they certainly boost the local economy in many ways.

Connecticut, with its prime location between Boston and New York, has long been a place from which companies served both of those markets.  Even as the world becomes more technological, and much more things are done online and in the cloud, there are still more and more physical objects that get moved around daily.  Many more shoppers go online to buy, as opposed to driving to a traditional mall.  Streets are littered with FedEx and UPS trucks, and 54 cents of every advertising dollar is now spent online.

That should mean that our future in this state will depend upon our ability to help manufacturers and middlemen move goods from place to place, especially in the Northeast Corridor.  We are well suited for that, as long as we begin to focus more on our infrastructure.  The transportation lockbox in Hartford will be key for improving our roads and rails.  But geography, and our much lower real estate prices, are on our side.

Properties that are built as warehouses, distribution spaces, or flex spaces, and those that can be rehabbed into those types, are ripe for the picking.

Looking Up For 2019?

Our Commercial Department meeting this week was as full of listing and selling reports as we've seen in several years.  Agent after agent reported listings, and then stated that they were under contract.  This was true regardless of the part of the State, the type of property, and its use.  It seemed to us as though the first of the year brought a rush of people deciding that they had vacillated long enough.

To some extent, sellers planning to leave the State will also cause this kind of movement, so it may not all be good news, but it sure felt like it to us.  Even the suggestions from others around the table were positive, as to the likelihood that things would sell.  And this was all true despite the outside temperatures at 15 below with the wind chill, on the morning of the meeting. 

No one would be happier than we would be, if Connecticut were truly seeing a new beginning.  Between investment from those priced out of New York and Boston, users finally pulling the trigger on needed space, and startup businesses, there's a lot to spark the market. 

If you are a seller, consider listing now, while demand is strong and supply has not caught up.  If you are a buyer, don't hesitate.  Remember, he who hesitates is lost. 

Reaping the Rewards?

Now that the stock market has started to rally so strongly, maybe it’s time for people to take what they’ve made, and buy real estate instead.  In our region, prices are still very low, compared to even twenty years ago.  We used to have average home prices well above the national average, so that job recruits moving here were worried about finding affordable housing comparable to their previous homes.  Now, we are very close to the national average, and we haven’t gone up, in some areas, enough to cover the declines of the last decade.  Commercial prices have been bumping along, also not moving up over time.  Some industrial buildings are at prices equal to those of years ago.  While some towns have a shortage of smaller commercial spaces, others have empty big box stores, many of which could be repurposed.  We are very short on affordable housing in our region, and the gap keeps growing, as rents continue to rise.  Even as housing prices for homes have declined, rents have doubled, and many tenants are paying a percentage of their incomes for rental units that is considered to be onerous.

 

What does all this mean for buyers?  Real estate is, and always has been, cyclical to some extent.  Through the boom  years, we would say that what goes up, must come down.  Now it seems that the opposite should also be true:  What went down, will come back up.  There is still an opportunity in our area, which isn’t true in much of the country—especially the coasts—to get normal appreciation on purchases, given the current state of prices.  We know that investors have been increasingly drawn to our state, because of the high prices in Boston and NY.  Why would locals not invest as well?  While we’ve been reading about the woes of Connecticut, others have been coming from out of state and out of the country, and buying and buying.  With our deeper knowledge of the local market, we should be able to do better than they could.  So let’s make a resolution in 2019:  Buy local!

Favored by Fortune

Those of us in Connecticut real estate would like to thank Boston and New York.  If they weren't so expensive, we might not be seeing the spate of sales that we've had in the past few months.  Although Connecticut faces fiscal and policy challenges, its location between two major centers of growth means that it benefits from the rise in prices seen in the two cities that bracket it.

Investment property is clearly drawing attention from buyers priced out of the Boston and NYC markets.  We are starting to see the same dynamic in demand for user properties, distribution facilities, and land.  Even home prices are beginning to reflect first-time buyers who cannot afford New York, just as we used to see.

It's impossible to predict how far the sprawl of metro Boston will end up going, but Connecticut will surely reap at least some rewards.  Fairfield County is already considered a suburb of New York, and that will continue.  If rail is upgraded, which we are all waiting for, that spillover will explode.  In the meantime, we can just be happy to see a great increase in commercial activity.

New Haven Class A Market Will Face Challenges in 2018

Article is from the Connecticut and New Haven Business News

The biggest factor in the New Haven real estate market was the decision by Alexion Pharmaceuticals [NYSE: Alxn] to move its headquarters to Boston

Alexion has placed 280,000 square feet of office space on the market for sublease with a term ending in 2030. For the time being the company plans to keep its research personnel in approximately 220,000 square feet of lab space in the building.

Alexon’s ability to save the estimated $250 million dollars per year that its “reorganization” expects may well be challenged by the cost to move however, as conditions in Boston get more expensive. The Boston real estate market continues to tighten, likely presenting Alexion with square footage more than double what the company pays in New Haven.

Anecdotal reports from the Boston market is that hiring in the “tech space” has grown more difficult as competition for tech workers and the costs of living for employees in the city continue to escalate..

According to SmartAssets.com a financial services data website an Alexion employee will have to be paid $128,000 annually to live comfortably in Beantown. The median income in greater New Haven is approximately $68,000.

Considering the 30% Class A vacancy rate and the premium costs associated with the new construction of Alexion’s headquarters at 100 College Street the ability for the company to recoup its real estate costs through the sublease market may be in doubt.

The startup and small business nature of New Haven’s biotech and general business community illustrates the problems in filling the Alexion space at its current costs. The region’s premier Class A office building 555 Long Wharf has 68,685 square feet available for sublease from Medtronic [NYSE:MDT, formerly Covidien] at an advertised rate of under $20 per square foot.

Biohaven [NYSE:BHVN] recently raised more than $168 million in a public offering and chose to purchase the former Liberty Bank location a Class B building on Church Street for its headquarters in a purchase last August 2017. The opening in February [2018] of the 107,000-square foot District Tech space will also be an additional competitor for the sublease space.[ see New Haven's New Tech District is Right Around The Corner]

The Alexion relocation announcement has had a major impact on the city’s vacancy numbers, office vacancy citywide jumped from 14.1 to 19.3%.

Class A vacancy increased from 19.1% to 30.3%. Vacancy in the New Haven Central Business District rose from 8 to 16.1 %.

Most of the increase in the numbers is a result of the Alexion move, but the Class A vacancy rates also increased as Medtronic increased its offering of sublease space at 555 Long Wharf Drive from 37,265 to 68,865 square feet [see above]. The new sublease space resulted in a jump in non-CBD vacancy [a category that was unaffected by Alexion] from 21.7 to 22.9%.

In 2014 Winstanley sold a partnership interest in 100 College Street [Alexion building] and the nearby 300 George Street to Wexford Science and Technology, a division of BioMed Realty Trust of San Diego. The deal valued the two properties, which have a total just more than 1 million square feet, at $308 million.

Winstanley retained an equity interest and responsibility for management of the properties. Wexford has since been bought by Ventas Inc., based in Chicago.

Amazon and Connecticut--A Good Match?

Plenty of pundits have already weighed in on the issue, but I feel compelled to comment on the Amazon search for a second headquarters, because the question emphasizes both the benefits and deficits of Connecticut.  Everyplace in the country is competing, so we should strut our stuff as well.

They want a place with access to a skilled workforce.  We have that in abundance.  Our higher education system is good, and our proportion of highly educated workers is above most other locations.  We also have lots of people looking for good jobs, or leaving the state because they can't find them.

Amazon is a distribution company at heart.  Its real mission is to get you what you want, when you want it. That's different from manufacturing, or even from most retail businesses.  Rather than having a unique product, they have a unique delivery and distribution system, because they both store and consign items.  They ship from other places and other companies, even from other distributors, and they do so on a timeline that's very hard to beat.  Where is Connecticut located?  Right between the Northeastern hubs of NYC and Boston.  Our future is, as some have said, in distribution.  We are too high-cost to manufacture some things, and too small to have the population to use all the goods ourselves.  But we can ship in every direction.  And we have excess real estate at reasonable prices.

So why aren't we on the short list?  Probably we never made the long list, and that would be because we have a reputation for being a tough place to do business.  Not just expensive, since both Boston and NYC can beat us on that front, but unfriendly and anti-business.  We are almost alone in our own quadrant there, although Vermont is probably nearby. 

It certainly doesn't help that Hartford is poised to file for bankruptcy, we have no state budget, and we have union contracts that are far more generous that the states around us, or anywhere.  If you were outside the State, reading the papers, would you consider us?  I certainly hope so, for the reasons above.  And I hope even more that the Legislature and the Governor's cabinet do everything they can to address the issues in this paragraph. 

Now is the Time to Invest in Connecticut

We have had so much bad economic news in Connecticut recently--and well-deserved, as we definitely made bad choices over many years--that we have forgotten one basic tenet of real estate:  It comes down to location, location, location.  Although businesses are up in arms all over the State, and many are leaving or considering doing so, they may be discounting the location we have here.

One of our agents believes that, in the future, Connecticut's commercial sector will all be about distribution.  I think that could well be true.  As New York and Boston soar to greater and greater heights, and lure young people from all over the country to settle in those two areas, here we sit--right between the two cities.  While we certainly have not invested in infrastructure in the way we should have, we still have a proximate location that will make our land and buildings valuable for distributing goods.  As one of the articles I read recently pointed out, whatever you can do with planes and ships, you need roads and trucks for at least the last few miles of any delivery. 

So, while factories and malls may be repurposed over time, there will always, in our lifetimes, be a need for space in Southern New England, and that's what we have.  Before others figure that out, and bid up the prices, those of us already here should take a second look at what is available.  It may be that location trumps all those bad decisions.  Let's hope so. 

Where Are All the Cranes?

I've been in Washington, D.C. and Boston recently, and both are hard to recognize from days past.  There are cranes everywhere, and new neighborhoods are springing up, while the old ones are either gentrifying, or just increasing in price.  It's amazing to see, in the case of Boston, what a difference 100 miles can make!

Both of those cities have been enjoying boom times, and Boston has been an outlier on the upper end of the growth curve in New England for some time.  It has been successful in recruiting biotech companies with high-paying jobs, despite high housing prices, in part because it has reached critical mass in that field.  Two-career families can both find employment, and there are lots of research universities around to feed the fire.

Could New Haven become a mini-Boston?  In some ways, it already is.  Cultural opportunities and the percentage of academics in the population surely rival Boston.  Proximity to NYC is important, and we have that.  What do we still need?  More business and job growth--when Boston, in what's long been called Taxachusetts, seems better from a tax point of view, you know you're in trouble.  Better transportation--investment in roads and railroads, plus expansion of Tweed's airline service.  And, of course, a more positive reputation--are you listening in Hartford?