But there are still believers

30 Will Merry Lane has sold for $3 million. Owners started at $4.490 million back in September 2018, but even $3 is a vote of confidence in Greenwich, which should send a warm tingle down sellers’ legs.

For a counterview, Publius has sent along an article from the Middletown Press, detailing Connecticut’s slow, sad descent, entitled “The Lost Decade”. Excerpt:

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.