To the Editor:

The Wilton Model is broken.

Calling it the “Wilton Model” is a bit self-centric, but we exemplify it as well as anyone: a wealthy, low-density, racially/culturally/economically homogenous New York City commuter town, with that homogeneity maintained through exclusive zoning and fanatical insistence on “local control.” Not a particularly commendable set of principles to build a town around, but it has, at least, been financially rewarding. For decades, a sparsely-populated suburb full of 90th-percentile-income white Protestants could offer excellent, lavishly-funded schools and services while keeping taxes relatively low.

What we’re seeing now — not just in Wilton — is this is no longer enough: rising costs, declining commercial property values, and the diminished appeal of rural suburbs to people who aren’t moving there for the schools mean the numbers simply don’t add up like they used to; we’re spending more than ever and yet still not spending enough to maintain our current level of excellence. A rather tidy recent illustration of this was when our former Board of Education chair went from warning about the impact of budget cuts in that capacity to resigning her seat and moving out of Wilton because she couldn’t find a new home here after putting her own on the market.

It’s not just finances where this system is failing us, either. Our appalling lack of diversity works to the detriment of every aspect of our school system, from test scores to team sports — we can’t fill our classrooms with the best and brightest when so many of them feel unwelcome here. And if you want a more exciting downtown filled with cool shops, restaurants and theaters, you need more residents to patronize it; Wilton Center is what a town center looks like when most potential customers have to spend 15 minutes dodging suicidal deer to get there. Driving through endless woods in your Ford Expedition is hardly an environmental win, either; a higher-density town with sidewalks and bike paths everywhere would be a whole lot “greener” than we are now.

But basically, a two-acre single-family-zoned town with excellent schools and amenities at a low price is simply not something we get to be anymore; at least one of those things has to give. However much you might cherish Wilton’s “rural character,” or protest that the “friendly small-town feel” is the reason you moved here, it’s no longer sustainable, and the sooner we come to terms with that, the sooner we can start thinking about what comes next.

Some people — particularly those who distrust public education anyway — might be okay with letting our schools falter in order to keep Wilton cheap, empty and culturally homogenous, and that’s pretty much the path that we’re on now. Wealth and parental engagement will probably impose a reasonable floor on test scores for a while — families already spend a ton of time and money filling in for things the schools don’t cover — but Wilton Public Schools (WPS) will nevertheless eventually cease to offer anything more than safe, boring, replacement-level education: nobody’s will move here for the schools anymore, and people with better options will start to move away, cratering our property values as they go.

Others would be totally fine with seeing taxes go up enough to keep pace with the district’s needs; WPS parents of course have ample reasons to want well-funded schools, and for many who’ve moved here recently, their property tax bills are relatively modest compared to their mortgages, and protecting the value of their investment is much more important than saving a couple hundred bucks a year on taxes. However, driving out elderly white people so we can replace them with younger, richer white people isn’t exactly moving us in a positive direction diversity-wise, or putting us on a path for long-term fiscal sustainability.

That leaves us with the third option: add a lot more housing and a lot more residents, to turbocharge our grand list and reinvigorate our community. This will require both regulatory changes — any two-acre lot that can feasibly be divided into two one-acre lots should be allowed to do so immediately — and physical ones: expanding our sewer, water, and road infrastructure to support more density in more places will be a decades-long effort, and the sooner we get started, the better. As things stand, it seems like we’ll run out of sites to build new apartments long before we run out of developers interested in building them.

New housing alone may not be enough, though; we need to start thinking beyond Wilton too. Many neighboring towns are going through similar struggles, and we ought to begin informal conversations about whether there’s some version of regionalization — sharing schools and other services — that might work to the benefit of all of us. The Hands Off Our Schools caricature — where Norwalk’s school district would swallow up Wilton’s, improving neither — might have been a dumb idea, but a district unifying Norwalk with all its neighbors would be a diverse financial and academic powerhouse, with buying power of a mid-sized city.

We might even start looking at organizational changes beyond regionalization. Connecticut’s system of devolving responsibility directly from the state to small towns is almost unheard of across the rest of the country — even ultra-conservative Florida has 67 county governments and over 1,900 special districts — and perhaps there’s good reason for that. A woodsy, 27-square-mile rectangle with ledge everywhere might actually not be the optimal organizational unit for modern local government; Wilton’s future growth prospects as part of a larger regional entity of some kind — with many more options for where to locate new housing and infrastructure — seem considerably rosier than those for Wilton as a standalone town.

My main point, however, is simply that it’s wrong to look at things like residential valuation shifts and building maintenance backlogs as isolated problems: they’re symptoms of a larger crisis decades in the making, arising out of fundamental flaws in the way Wilton is organized and run. Only by going back to the basics — rethinking our whole approach to housing and planning, and our relationships with the state and other towns — do we have any hope of saving ourselves.

Michael Love

26 replies on “Letter: The Wilton Model is Broken”

  1. Michael, well said, and I agree that the “Wilton Model” is moribund and needs to evolve to something much more in-line with human and more that human thriving rather than extraction, exclusion, and inequality. This is obviously a big task. How do you suggest we start?

    1. Thanks! I think we start by gathering information:

      1) Housing: how much multi-family can we add now, what would it cost to expand our infrastructure to add more, how can we ensure enough of that new housing is affordable (infrastructure may be a useful carrot there), and – even without infrastructure expansion – how much housing could we add to the single-family part of Wilton through zoning changes. (the POCD only contemplates what’s doable with existing zoning)

      2) Regionalization: what’s the appetite for this among our neighboring towns, what might the state be willing to contribute to help this happen, and what might the financials actually look like. (it’s worth noting that since Norwalk is relatively small + wealthy, a “group all of the towns around a city with that city” approach to regionalization would actually be considerably easier to pull off here than in, say Hartford)

      3) Country / district / whatever-we-call-it governments: how do other states do this, how have transitions from smaller to larger municipal governments worked in other places, how does this interact with current state law, and again, what’s the appetite for this among our neighbors / the state.

      I’m sure there are other paths forward beyond these three, but I don’t think the current levels of school budget cuts are sustainable, and I’ve come around to the idea that unlimited tax hikes might not be either, so we need to start looking outside of that one parameter of annual budget numbers.

      This could all be investigated by a newly-created commission of some sort, “Wilton 2050” or something similar, but pieces of it could also be done through existing boards – I daresay we’d get much better information from neighboring towns out of direct BOS-to-BOS / BOE-to-BOE communication than from a random citizen committee writing polite letters.

      Of course there’s also the problem of getting the public interested in this – part of why I posted this now is that I expect that in the next few weeks there are going to be some numbers coming out of both the BOE and BOF that make a lot of people (on both sides) extremely unhappy, and I’m hopeful that might open people’s minds to solutions they would not have previously considered.

    2. My advice to Wiltonians who crave diversity and high-density housing – move to Norwalk, or better yet, New York City, where I’ve lived for decades after being raised in Wilton. No exclusionary two-acre zoning here. New York is wonderfully diverse but its public schools turn out students who can’t read or write, its subways derail, pedestrians fear the onslaught of e-bikes, and oh, by the way, protestors this morning shut down the city’s bridges. Try that for awhile and Wilton’s problems might seem a little more manageable.

      1. I once suggested that people who were unhappy with Wilton’s high taxes ought to consider moving to a lower-tax conservative state, which created a stir that culminated in an elected official accusing me of illegal age discrimination; I haven’t made the mistake of bringing it up again, and I don’t think it’s a particularly helpful suggestion in the other direction either.

      2. Bret, understand your trepidation here. Oftentimes when we speak about housing density, diversity, and giving up some level of local control it screams urban city living. That does not have to be the case and with a little imagination and some commitment I think we could actually create something that is actually more Wilton than Wilton is now. Wilton is a beautiful place if we want to keep it that way we need to change. Like it or not change is coming and better to change on our own terms than to have it done for us.

  2. For those who don’t care for the once-rural countryside with wide open spaces, there are plenty of urbanized places to consider. “Development” can be a blessing or a curse. Depends of you point of view. Mine is: I’ve been a Connecticut Yankee — and also a social liberal — for many decades. Self-reliance, within reason is my North Star. City folks are great, but please don’t bring urban “necessities” with you. In place of sidewalks, restaurants and retail stores, we prefer peace, silence and open spaces over any city conveniences.

    1. The point of my piece is that that’s not a combination that we get to have anymore. I’m not advocating for it for aesthetic reasons, I’m saying we need more people or regionalization or *something* because the math isn’t going to work for Wilton being a rural town with good schools and low taxes anymore.

      At the moment, the trendlines are pointing to “rural town with mediocre schools and high taxes” – if that’s what the majority in Wilton actually want then so be it, but I don’t think that’s the case, and I’m hoping there might be another, better path we can come together on.

      (and sidewalks are a ‘city convenience’ only if you think that the best way to enjoy your rural town is by driving everywhere)

      1. Change Hartford not wilton….bigger guvment won’t solve anything which is what u r really advocating for.

  3. Michael, you are clearly a thoughtful, articulate man, but I think you are getting this wrong. Your premise that increasing costs are going to force either higher taxes or cuts to the currently great Wilton school district is correct. I live in Darien, and the estimate to renovate three of the five elementary schools was grossly underestimated due to runaway inflation, especially related to construction. Not to mention the cost of the bonds since the plans were created.

    But where you miss the mark is on the solution. Schools are run on a teacher per pupil basis. I suppose there might be some economies of scale if you can fit more students into one building, but classroom size and personnel are the primary costs. I just don’t believe adding cheaper housing units with a lower tax base helps because it still brings students but fewer tax dollars. I think it makes matters worse and is the reason Darien, New Canaan, and Westport have far lower taxes than Stamford or Norwalk, which have models and populations more similar to the one you describe.

    I will say that I lean more populist and really wish I could find a town that is pretty, diverse, and has low taxes and good schools. Unfortunately that feels like an elusive dream in Fairfield County.

    I do hope I’m wrong and you’re right. If so, I’ll be joining you In the new and improved Wilton.

    1. Thanks.

      I don’t think most of this housing would go to families with public school students; if you look at the forecasts from the BOE, they do not expect an enormous bump in the student population from the new apartments currently planned or under construction. Certainly people do rent apartments in Wilton to get their kids into the school system, and that’s wonderful, but they aren’t doing it in the sorts of numbers that blow up our school budget.

      WPS students make up about 21% of Wilton’s population; in Stamford that number is 12%, in Norwalk 13%. Even in Westport it’s only 18%. Large houses on 2-acre lots – the dominant type of home here now – are incredibly desirable to people raising kids, and pretty much any other type of housing we might add to our inventory is going to be less so.

      My parents downsized a few years ago to a delightful little 1500-square-foot house in Rowayton; it’s compact and easy to maintain and cheap to heat and walking-friendly and pretty much perfect for them. There are not nearly enough houses like that in Wilton, and for all the talk about warmer weather or lower taxes or whatever, there are an awful lot of people like our former BOE chair who leave Wilton simply because they can’t find a house here. Creating the infrastructure + regulatory framework to build out that sort of housing in parts of Wilton – compact little houses on compact little lots with the ability to visit your neighbors and go shopping without having to get in a car – would be one great way to juice our grand list and provide more options for people to remain here.

  4. Has anyone even considered the environmental impact of all this development? There is value in small rural low density community living. This is a human choice and part of the diversity spectrum. I vote for trees, forests, clean water, clean air, low erosion, birds, insects and low temperatures! I’m tired of hearing people who refuse to acknowledge that development negatively impacts the ecology and as a result people! If you want busy streets, crowded schools, dense housing- go live in a city and stop cramming your ideology on the rest of us! If you love your kids you will vote to be good land stewards, and stop complaining! We are not going to build ourselves out of this… and developers and lawyers are the only ones smiling as they continue to snatch up properties and plan their next land rape, while the rest of us sit around and ponder our regulations, toy with feelings of guilt, and refuse to acknowledge the reality of environmental health. Ask your kids, they probably know more than you, and they think about environmental health and the value of trees and open space all the time. Where will they run to after you blacktop it all?

    1. First off, once again, I’m not pushing this for aesthetic reasons; it’s a matter of fiscal necessity. If we don’t want to build a lot more housing then we need to become the rural part of a larger town / borough / whatever of some kind. But the whole point of my article is that simply remaining a rural undeveloped town with good schools and low taxes is no longer an option for Wilton; I’m not advocating development for its own sake, I’m doing so because I don’t think we really have a choice about it.

      That being said: Wilton is new-growth forest on former farmland, within easy commuter distance of NYC and other job markets. The good we can do for the planet by fitting more people into the same space – and reducing all of our ecological footprints by having smaller houses on smaller lots and driving less – vastly, vastly exceeds any environmental harm done by more development; global warming is an existential crisis, a lack of adequate habitat for deer and squirrels is not. Having Wilton remain low-density and covered with trees is neither an economically nor an ecologically optimal use for this particular chunk of land.

      1. Not optimal because because misguided people like you made it so..
        Stay small and stay modest (within your means), pay your fair share, and be a good steward! Yes, it can be done. As for Cities, yes, please do use my taxes to fix cities (Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Norwalk, Stamford) so people want to be there! I agree, that is the most environmentally sound way to build housing. How did Hartford get that wrong? So we agree that we need to fix our cities so people like you – will want to be there, rather than sprawl into rural areas and create a carpet of urban humanity.

        1. 2 of my 3 suggested solutions were along those lines – making Wilton part of some larger entity and building more housing there instead. I’d also be OK with adopting an approach like in a number of other states, where the state takes most of the property taxes and covers most of the school budgets. I expect all of these would be a tougher sell here than building more housing.

          But I have no particular problem with Wilton remaining rural as long as we can make the numbers work – I don’t feel any pressing need to leave my own 2-acre-zoned house as it comes with access to an excellent school system. I just don’t see a way to ensure that without a big restructuring of how we’re organized and how we pay for stuff. If regionalization or county governments or whatever are more appealing to voters than higher density, I’ll enthusiastically support that approach.

  5. “we can’t fill our classrooms with the best and brightest when so many of them feel unwelcome here”. Please explain further

    1. Exactly. Please explain where you got this made-up idea used to further your political agenda and drive the narrative you need to be true… but isn’t.

  6. Good grief, the obsession with race never ends. From this post:

    “Our appalling lack of diversity works to the detriment of every aspect of our school system, from test scores to team sports — we can’t fill our classrooms with the best and brightest when so many of them feel unwelcome here.”

    A) “Appalling lack of diversity?” So unnecessary and hyperbolic! In what way is it “appalling?” What social engineering would you like to see take place to get more non-white people in to town, and what, to your way of thinking, would this solve? Not every town or city in America can be perfectly representative. Large urban areas are going to have more black people. The state of California now has a 34.7% white population, WAY below the national average. Should we shove some more white folk in there to match the 62% of the American population?

    B) “So many feel unwelcome here” – a completely made-up out of thin air statement. I get that the ultra-left progressive way of thinking sees only race. Fortunately, after October 7th, we’ve begun to see the poisonous results that this line of thinking brings and Americans, on the whole, have started to more loudly reject it. I’m a classical liberal Democrat and find this virtue signaling, extremist rhetoric to be harmful and divisive. No northeast town like Wilton is going to make a minority class feel unwelcome in 2024. They’re not all victims! They’re wonderful, capable people who don’t need your misguided charity.

    Let’s also be honest about two more points: The first is that you’re trying to scare people into thinking that if only we became more diverse then our schools would be better ranked, thereby protecting property values. Forcibly adding diversity to schools will not increase our rankings; in fact, it will do just the opposite. It won’t crater them, come on.

    I know this one has your blood boiling. As the old showrunner of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart used to say: “Conservatives hate science, and progressives hate math.”

    Finally, your point about driving out elderly white people so we can replace them with “younger, richer white people” isn’t exactly moving us in a positive direction diversity-wise.” Who cares?? This is what the town is. Why are more affluent, younger whites not welcome in your mind?

    All are welcome in Wilton, even the evil whites. The unhealthy obsession with race has got to end. Stop dividing people by race! Especially with MLK Day coming up next week – perhaps the man’s vision for society should be honored.

    1. Hoo boy. I’m going to ignore most of this because the last thing I want to do is give oxygen to it, but just to clarify, there are other forms of diversity besides racial diversity, and driving away all of the elderly people would be depriving us of one of those kinds of diversity.

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