MICHAEL DALY: It’s just how we live and it’s just one less stress. I always still think that the lifeblood economically and socially does come from the city and it is important to us, but I’m not going to risk the family, my family living in some of these problems.

JAY GITLIN: There is a very strong sense of community here but where do you find it? It’s in the schools. A lot of suburbs are like this. We’ve sort of re-conceptualized what community is. Those are the centers of social activities and that’s the center of public discourse. It may be a limited public discourse, but that’s where it is. And people do come together and they tend to come together around their kids.

NARRATOR: Have we really done the best for all of our kids by living in the suburbs?

The landmark Sheff vs O’Neill case has focused attention on the quality of education and lack of diversity in state schools.

Schools in Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport are now nearly 100% minority enrolled, while the outer-ring suburban schools remain overwhelmingly white.

BUD BRAY: In the morning, I have a route driving a school bus in New London in which I’ll pick up the offspring of the more affluent citizenry of that community. These are largely White students whose parents are obviously well educated and they live quite well. In the afternoon I pick up inner-school children that go to an elementary school who live in dilapidated all too often unsafe, unsanitary, inner-city housing; single parent offspring, a host of problems you can see in their eyes that they suffer. The irony is that within the same community are both the suburbanites and the urban dwellers and what they reflect are unfamiliarity with each other. They largely don’t know each other.

JACK HASAGAWA: I believe firmly that you can't have a world class education unless that education addresses what kids have to do when they get out of the school. And one of the things that kids have to do when they get out of school is to be comfortable, to be able to form meaningful relationships for a variety of reasons with people who are different from them.

JOHN BRITTAIN: This has an impact upon the economic conditions, too, because the students who are not graduating with any educational ability from the urban areas are needed to supply the greatest work force of the future.

THE COMMON GOOD

NARRATOR: The pursuit of the good life in the suburbs reflects a classic American conflict – how to balance the welfare of the family vs. the common good of the statewide community.

HERB JANICK: I don’t think the aspirations to live in this kind of place should be criticized. They’re not totally negative. I think what they do though is they encourage us to develop this morality. People don’t invest in the problems of others. It encourages this privacy and this kind of encapsulation that I don’t think is healthy because we all live in a larger community and this makes it easy for us to forget that.

BUD BRAY: As a younger man I was inspired with the idealism of the ‘60s. Now I realize that there’s a part of all of us that is motivated to get to the suburbs, have a nice house on a cul-de-sac, lots of privacy, a pool in the back yard. I had to make the decision not too long ago whether one of my daughters was gonna attend an inner-city school or a suburban school to complete her high school education. And I must confess that when it came down to it, I did probably the exact thing that I suggest we should not do and I opted for the suburban experience for my daughter. I can understand the difficulty of making a decision that would necessarily cause risk to you and your loved ones.

NARRATOR: Can the good life in Connecticut survive?

LAURA WIER CLARKE: We’ve built ourselves into a corner or a suburban box and it’s going to take a while for us to dig our way out of it. So many small towns are going to be absorbed right into a continuous suburban development of what we see around us, that Connecticut will lose the character that we associate with the state. We consider that character to be one of Connecticut's really strongest assets, not just culturally, but economically.

MATTHEW NEMERSON: If we don’t change the direction we’re going we may destroy the wonderful things that we have. Eventually the quality of life, the picturesque sense that you have of the community that is not urban will be destroyed. It will be a different kind of urbanity. It will be 8 lane roads with one story shopping and strip malls and office parks as far as the eye can see and then off in the distance somewhere crowded streets with again, one family houses on them

And that will be bad for cities and for the suburbs that are destroyed.

ROBERT DECRESCENZO: To a certain extent people think you can put walls up around the central cities and the problems will never get out to some of these outlying suburbs. I could tell you they’re wrong.

JOHN BRITTAIN: Until they come together towards some priority policy to reinvigorate the urban cities, this state is continued on a destiny for a collision course in time between the haves and the have-nots.

SANDY KLEBANOFF: All of us have come to understand that without the city none of us really can survive. But preserving what's precious about those individual boundaries yet finding ways to do things with a larger grouping, that's our challenge. Because if we all turn inward, we can't make a go of it anymore. We just can't. It's clear to me that the trick in all of this is to make sure that we don't do what I call level down. The suburbs have got to continue to provide the kinds of services that people want. And we don't want to become slums and we don't want to become havens of crime and gangs.

JOHN BRITTAIN: I think there is room for the suburbs to stay as they are and to be nice places to live, perhaps, with a slightly enhanced diversity. I think what we have to do is restore and reinvigorate the cities to make them alive and more vibrant, too, and to begin to have some of the schools, that are just as good if not better than suburban schools so that we can attract suburban parents to bring their children to school when they come to work and to take them home when they return to.

MATTHEW NEMERSON: I think that in five years you will see people literally saying, "Let’s see if we can’t not only save money which is politically very popular, but let’s create more of a sense of community." Whether we ever get to the point of giving up control of zoning, of schools, that will be one of the real tests and I think a lot of people say that may not happen. Now the next step, which is very difficult, is to articulate talking about integration - integration by race, integration by ethnic group and integration by income group. And I think that that’s the kind of leadership that has to come from religious leadership. It has to come from business leadership. And I think ultimately it has got to come from statewide political leadership.

JAY GITLIN: But we need a way to think about these things that will not take away people’s sense of protection. And not seem to threaten what they’ve built and what they’ve framed in a very private way.

JEFF DAVIS: People have to be able to talk about things, get some sense of comfort not only for where we are now but for what our options are, for where we go in the future. I think the more and more that we force the dialogue, that we put issues out in front of people, the more and more they’re going to begin to understand that they have common interests in trying to solve problems on a regional basis. Whether it be in the courts or whether it be house to house or whether it be here in the General Assembly or whether it be in the Governor’s office. Unless there is a continued pressing on all those different fronts, we will continue to fall further behind the rest of the states in this nation and it will continue to suck more tax dollars needlessly out of our pockets.

MARC SHAFER (West Hartford Resident): And if all of us move to the suburbs we can all go awww, you know, and just pretend there’s not a problem here anywhere. But that’s what the problem is is that everyone is just trying to run away from it. Everyone is just trying to say, "OK. I’m moving as far away as I can from this problem and it’s just not gonna catch me for a long time because by the time it catches me I’m gonna be 90 and I don’t care." You know, so at some point we have to rise up and try to stem this thing. We have to say, "What are we gonna do about this?"

PRODUCTION CREDITS