The intersting thing abuot the one I know about personally - Hartford - is that a suburb of Hartford (sharing a 10 mile long border) was recently rated a top 5 place to live by (I think) Forbes.
Hartford’s problem isn’t hwat this article says, it’s that no one actually LIVES there; we all work there, but we live in the suburbs.
and in CT, ZERO tax dollars from any town goes to another town, so the cities like Hartford (And bridgeport and Waterbury and New Britain and Waterbury) all fall apart while the towns around them (relatively) thrive.
CT is an odd place to live.
I agree that it is an odd place to live but I'm not sure your point about taxes is right - - the state government is funded largely by income taxes that are mostly paid from parts of Fairfield County and then spent across the rest of the state. And money is paid out directly from the state to the towns in the form of education aid, which is effectively a transfer from the wealthier places to the poorer ones. Looked at that way, the dead cities of Connecticut have been hugely subsidized by the thriving places for decades. Yet the cities still rot because they are cesspools of all our modern liberal-caused ills (welfare state, uncontrolled immigration, etc...)
It’s the same with Detroit, Grosse Pointe is probably one of the best suburban towns in the entire country.
I am not entirely in love with Texas’ solution to the problem that places like Hartford has in Connecticut.
But, Texas laws protect its biggest cities, like Dallas and Houston for instance, from “losing” its citizens to “suburbs”.
In order to protect “the core” from losing its base, the central city is empowered to annex, a village, or whole town, nearest it, into itself - and not because the area on the edge asked for it but because the core said it was time. There are standards and limits of course, but as the core expands by annexation then over time the limits are moving further out from the original core as well.
The one thing it does do is it prevents the “suburbs” from emptying the tax-base from the core.
I remember when I lived in a northern “suburb” of Houston - Spring Texas - in 1980-81, there was talk that not only would Spring become part of Houston someday, but, they predicted that someday The Woodlands (about 30 miles north of Houston) would someday enter Houston’s embrace as well.
Again, my libertarian and Conservative ideals do not leave me jumping for joy over how Texas handled this issue, and maybe I am wrong but maybe it is why Galveston is the only “dead” Texas town on the list.