Chris Powell: Could Conn. suburbs get city life without its nastiness?

A shell in which to put housing?

—Photo by Justin Cozart

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Maybe a couple of the state's problems can solve each other. 

Many suburban shopping malls are fading and failing as many people increasingly shop from home via the Internet and have their purchases delivered. With its COVID hysteria, government keeps scaring them against going out, and with the economy’s problems, many people can't afford to buy as much.

Meanwhile, Connecticut has a desperate shortage of housing, and soaring housing prices are a major cause of the worsening poverty in the state.

So property developers here and around the country are interested in converting fading and failed malls to housing or attaching multi-family housing to them. 

Since mall property is already in commercial use and fully equipped with utilities, zoning obstacles and neighborhood objections should be much reduced, and new residents on site might substantially increase the customer base for retailers and professional services remaining in a mall. If enough housing at malls was built, housing costs would diminish for everyone.

A project successfully combining a shopping mall with a lot of new housing might create a walkable environment with much less need for cars -- making something resembling city life available in the suburbs without the poverty-induced nastiness that has overtaken most cities.

Sustaining rather than eradicating poverty would remain big business for government, but any substantial increase in housing might do more to reduce poverty than any other government social program.

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New Haven sometimes seems to be striving to embody the metaphor about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The city's Peace Commission may think that it has achieved the big objective cited on its Internet site -- averting nuclear war -- but it seems to have been surprised by Gaza's recent attack on Israel. And though crime continues to plague New Haven while more than three-quarters of the city's schoolchildren are not performing at grade level, many being chronically absent, the other day a committee of the city council found time for a different issue: whether the city should become the first municipality in Connecticut to prohibit the sale of menthol cigarettes.

The Federal Food and Drug Administration is also moving to ban menthol cigarettes. The rationale offered is that menthol flavoring in cigarettes appeals especially to children and members of racial minorities. The unstated rationale is that children and racial minorities can't be persuaded to avoid smoking.

A municipal ban would be only pious posturing. It would not stop city residents from crossing the city line to buy menthol cigarettes in adjacent towns. Indeed, a ban well might create another contraband market in the city. Even federal law and state law haven't prevented deadly drugs like heroin and fentanyl from ravaging New Haven and other cities. 

Besides, a municipal ban on menthol cigarettes would be laughably hypocritical, insofar as New Haven has approved five marijuana dispensaries in the city, though marijuana presents health risks as serious as those of menthol cigarettes. But somehow marijuana has become politically correct. 

Why are New Haven's elected officials bothering with this silliness? Probably for the same reason that state legislators also spend so much time on the trivial. It distracts from their irrelevance to the big dangers of everyday life and Connecticut's longstanding problems that are never solved as the state continues to decline.

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Electricity rates aren't the only place where state government imposes hidden taxes. 

A recent report in the Connecticut Mirror reminded about another tax-hiding mechanism, the state's tax on bulk sales of gasoline, which lately has been about 22 cents per gallon. Gas stations pay the tax to wholesalers and recover it from their customers at the pump, where the retail sales tax is added, another 25 cents per gallon.

Drivers have some idea of the retail sales tax, especially since state government reduced it temporarily after the gas price spike resulting from Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the international sanctions on Russian oil. But few people know about the wholesale tax.

The wholesale tax on gas is another way state government encourages people to blame industry for high prices when government itself is largely responsible.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).