Chris Powell: Their lives will matter when they live next door

Old Town Hall in Hebron, Conn.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Will the "black lives matter" clamor echoing among Connecticut's white elected officials and white suburban residents ever mean anything? Or will it remain the usual pious posturing that makes its participants feel righteous while disguising their irrelevance?

A good place for divining the future may be Hebron, population 9,500, a lovely rural town in eastern Connecticut that claims "historic charm with a vision for the future." Last weekend the Democratic Town Committee there held a rally to protest police brutality and racism.

Announcing the rally, committee Chair Tiffany Thiele said, "This is just one part of the problem. We also have to address our country's socio-economic system, which is designed to disenfranchise individuals of color from the opportunities afforded to others."

"Designed to disenfranchise," eh? So how about starting with the opportunity to live in Hebron itself?

Opportunity in Hebron is almost entirely limited to white households with incomes above $100,000. Ninety-six percent of townspeople are white, fewer than a half percent black. Ninety-five percent of Hebron's housing is owner-occupied, the median house value nearly $300,000. The town has little inexpensive housing and so has little poverty.

Those are great demographics and they make it easy to oppose police brutality, since, having little poverty, the town has little crime and needs just a few police officers.

Hebron's demographics are so good because, by excluding inexpensive, high-density housing, the town's land-use policy, like that of most Connecticut towns outside the inner suburbs, also excludes not just welfare households but many self-supporting people of all races. This is why Hebron is 99 percent nonblack and why "black lives matter" is, at the moment, a merely theoretical concept there.

So will the Democratic committee soon hold a rally in support of, say, building multifamily housing in town or expanding school regionalism so that nonwhite students might go to Hebron's schools? Will black lives ever matter that much to Hebron's Democrats?

While Hebron's Democrats, like many suburban and rural Democrats, may be hypocritical about exclusive zoning, such zoning is meant far more as economic policy than as racial policy and it dates to Connecticut's earliest colonial times. Back then to move into a town people had to gain the approval of the people already living there, had to become "admitted inhabitants," a procedure seeking to ensure that newcomers would be self-supporting and not impose expense on their neighbors. There was nothing racial about it.

Today society is far more prosperous but broadening a town's demographics still risks imposing expense and lowering living conditions. That's because decades of mistaken welfare policy have turned Connecticut's cities into crime-ridden poverty factories with an underclass of fatherless households, making education and general advancement terribly difficult if not impossible there.

People are entitled to want to escape that, and in recent years many people have escaped it into Connecticut's inner suburbs, which increasingly are integrated racially and economically. But state government shows no interest in changing its welfare policy and does not realize that economic and racial integration might be achieved not just by hurling the unassimilable underclass into resentful suburbs but also by making the cities habitable for the middle class again.

Black lives won't really matter in Connecticut until state government stops manufacturing the poverty that no one wants to live near.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.