waterbury
New Haven was stumbling and struggling in the 1980s and early 1990s. Downtown was moribund, litter-strewn and dangerous — a Yale student (among others) was killed on the street in 1991. Yale alumni started checking in from around the country, telling school officials that the negative image of the city was discouraging applications. The university…
Read full story →NEWBURGH, N.Y. — South Miller Street is one of the toughest streets in the gritty little city of Newburgh, N.Y. Riven by poverty, blight, drugs and gang violence, a 2011 headline in New York Magazine labeled it the “Murder Capital of New York.” Even so, sagging rooflines, broken entryways and boarded windows of two-story and…
Read full story →By the middle of the last century, U.S. cities were showing their age. They had endured the Great Depression and World War II, two decades of deferred maintenance. They were losing residents and businesses to the suburbs. But a confident America, that had just turned German and Japanese cities to rubble, stepped up. Congress passed…
Read full story →WATERBURY — The irony carries great economic consequence: Once engines of Connecticut’s prosperity, the state’s former factories have long been massive liabilities for struggling cities. Connecticut has found a path to get these sites back into use, and it’s fueled with taxpayer money. Polluted industrial sites litter Connecticut’s struggling cities. Hulking, deserted and crumbling complexes…
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