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To the Editor:

West Hartford is a wonderful town for young people and young families.  We have fantastic schools, a vibrant town center, and we’re unusually walkable for a suburban town. We have much to be proud of, and I thank all of our town staff and current leaders for their achievements and their ongoing work.

I also think we have some major issues that I hope to address when it comes to the needs of young people and young families. We need to address our housing market, protect our kids’ mental health, get more serious about road safety, and support our boys and young men.

I’m smack dab in the middle of the Millennial generation. I graduated college right into the jaws of the Great Recession. I applied to dozens of jobs with my biomedical engineering degree, extensive internship experience, and a near-perfect GPA. I did not get a single response.  If I hadn’t gotten into medical school, I would have been grateful to go back to my old job at Hoyt’s Cinemas (which was a great job by the way – hi Jeff, Tina, and Rotha!).

Somehow I made it. This country has been great to me, and I’ve achieved the American Dream more than I could have ever imagined. But along the way, I know far too many people who got left behind. Young people who did everything right, who went to great schools, who still continue to live at a lower standard of living than their parents’ generation. This is due to our out-of-control cost of living, especially due to housing, as well as from taxes and inflation.

It’s a numbers game. In Connecticut we have dramatically reduced homebuilding relative to growing areas of the country, and relative to our own recent history. We have highly restrictive permitting and zoning regulations which distort the market, and then as a band-aid, we’ve slapped 8-30g on top to further distort the market. So when a unit finally does get built, it’s inevitably a large apartment building at an extraordinary cost.  The cost is high because easily six figures and months to years of work was sunk before a single shovel went into the ground. Then, in order to achieve income-restricted affordability requirements, a subsidy is often required from the market rate units (or the taxpayer). Red tape in zoning and permitting means that small scale unsubsidized housing for ownership becomes extinct, because you can’t spread those kinds of regulatory costs over five or ten units. The Democrats will try to blame lumber and appliance tariffs, but I believe that’s off base. If lumber and appliances were the problem, homes in California wouldn’t cost so much more than homes in Texas. In fact, I do support a certain degree of protectionism to ensure that Americans build homes for Americans, using American supplies.

Many municipalities are dealing with the same issues, and are converging on a similar menu of solutions. My colleagues and I have proposed a housing policy focused on unsubsidized homeownership which preserves the character and scale of our existing town fabric. Recently, an article described how Kalamazoo, MI, has implemented very similar ideas to our proposal, and they have gone a step further by creating pre-approved home plans that require very little red tape to get built.

Our housing market doesn’t feel broken for those of us who are comfortably housed, so it can be hard for us to perceive the stress in the economy. I’ve watched our home equity shoot through the roof within the last few years. But it IS broken for young people. We are not serving the next generation well if we do nothing while they get priced out of their own hometown. I hope that my kids might be able to live near us when they grow up. I hope they can raise their own children in school systems just as high quality as what they were raised with, and I hope that my grandkids will live nearby someday.

It really is tough for many of us to viscerally feel the level of economic disruption that is happening in our society. I feel it because every day I deal with the homelessness crisis in Hartford, which is driven by rapidly rising housing costs. Last year, Hartford was named the most expensive housing market in the country relative to income. I feel it because I grew up in the Midwest, and prior to moving to West Hartford, I lived in Cleveland and worked in Youngstown. In a recent WSJ poll, 69% of respondents said that the American Dream is dead.

It’s too easy to dismiss people who feel an absolutely justified rage at their shrinking economic horizons, to call them “deplorables” or “garbage.” That rage and frustration over the death of their American Dream came for the folks of Youngstown decades ago. I was there during the double blows of the Lordstown plant closure followed by COVID. But that rage is coming for us now. It’s coming for our young people. Look at the red shift in young voters. We must serve them better. We must not lock them out of America’s longstanding social contract by pricing them out.

Creating a West Hartford that works for young people and young families also means we must protect our kids’ mental health. We need to get them off social media, off screens, and back outside. We need to bring back a more traditional childhood, the kind of childhood that I myself had, giving our kids back the freedom to roam neighborhoods and visit each other. To be clear, this is primarily not a government duty. West Hartford parents are in this fight already, through initiatives like Let Grow, Wait Until 8th, and installing landlines for children instead of providing smartphones. Parents are starting free play group chats to push back on some of the over-organization of play time. But clearly one evidence-based intervention that our town should implement is a bell-to-bell smartphone ban. We should not let another school year pass. Just a few days ago I watched as two boys, probably aged 10 or 11, walked side by side from school. Both had their heads buried in their phones, and neither spoke a word to the other. We are losing childhood!!! This is not healthy. West Hartford must join places like Manchester; Fairfield; Jefferson County, KY; New York State; Texas; Virginia; Indiana; and others which have implemented school smartphone bans. We should send a strong message that smartphones are highly addictive, damaging mental health, sleep, learning, and socialization.

We can’t just take kids off screens and social media inside. We must improve safety outside. Like many parents, I carefully read Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, and I largely agree with his diagnosis. But he didn’t address a major plot hole, which is that our streets have become markedly more dangerous for pedestrians in recent decades. In the last 15 years pedestrian deaths nationwide are up nearly 80% and we feel that every day in West Hartford when we see rampant speeding and red light running.

Vision Zero is currently focused primarily on roads on which people have been hurt or killed, and I support those efforts. I have been one of the loudest voices advocating for rapid roadway safety improvements and have presented my findings directly to Town Council. But Vision Zero does very little to address our smaller neighborhood streets. We have a separate program for neighborhood traffic calming which is extremely onerous. I have spoken with many parents who have struggled to get the town to listen to them, who have advocated without avail for simple interventions like stop signs and speed bumps. I spoke with one mom who spent years advocating for a stop sign with no action from the town, until a child was hit by a car and the stop sign finally appeared.  I spoke with a dad who was told that speed bumps weren’t allowed on his small street, because very rarely a fire truck might come down the street – despite the fact that obviously fire trucks are capable of negotiating speed bumps. I spoke with another mom who struggled for years through meetings and petitions, and ultimately had to threaten press involvement before a diverter was installed on her street. And I’ve spoken with several families who are still muddling through this process, with unclear prospects of ever seeing results.

It doesn’t have to be like this! Our town government must deliver results for its people! I recently spoke with a New Haven traffic engineer who reviewed our program and was shocked at how difficult our town has made it to build simple traffic infrastructure.  He felt that our program was almost intentionally designed to be obstructionist, and he explained that New Haven aldermen can simply forward requests from citizens to the engineering department, and speed bumps just appear as a part of an existing on-call construction contract. We’re the nation that built the Empire State Building in 13 months. Did we forget how to build the simplest things to protect our children?

We must create safer neighborhood streets. We must write a new neighborhood traffic calming protocol that is simple, easy to follow, has clear timelines, and does not contain onerous unnecessary requirements. This benefits all of us, but especially benefits children who need reasonably safe environments in which to build their confidence and independence. They need to be able to ride their bikes, walk to friend’s houses, and walk or bike to school. Who here grew up watching shows like Nickelodeon’s Doug? Our hero Doug, 11 or 12 years old in the show, rode his bike to the Honker Burger in the very first episode to bring dinner home to his family. One of my daughter’s best friends lives directly across the street from me, but our little neighborhood street is so fast that I have a mild heart attack every time she crosses the street and when they ride their bikes around. I know that I can’t sequester her inside. She deserves freedom, and so will my son when he’s old enough.  I firmly believe it’s a child’s right to be able to travel around his or her neighborhood safely. We are not doing justice to our children if we don’t do everything within our power to make our neighborhood streets as safe as possible. Not only is this crucial for their mental health, but it is also crucial for their physical health in an age of rapidly increasing childhood obesity. If we can get more of our children offline and out into our neighborhoods, the outcomes might be wondrous.

I became a Republican for many reasons. One big reason is that the Democratic Party has essentially abandoned boys and young men, including our sons, whereas the Republican Party acknowledges the needs and contributions of males in our society. In my own line of work, I bear witness to the tragic fact that men die of overdoses at over double the rate of women, and die of suicide at over four times the rate. This is not to downplay the struggles of girls and women, both overlapping and unique. But I believe that we can’t have a truly family focused West Hartford if we don’t acknowledge both the struggles and promise of our boys and young men. Part of that goes back to our dysfunctional housing market – young men will struggle to grow into fathers and providers if there is no realistic path to homeownership. Part of that is related to, again, protecting children from negative online influences including some of the more misogynistic corners of the internet. Another possibility might be to build a boy-focused third space in one of our community centers. I would also strongly support efforts to bring the trades back into our schools, and to elevate trades to the same level as more “academic” pathways (I use quotes because trades often require even more math and science than so-called white collar jobs). I would support initiatives that encourage boys and men to enter stable, growing fields like healthcare and teaching, just as we encourage our daughters to enter STEM. Finally, I would support a study of boy-girl achievement and disciplinary gaps in our school system, and trying to address gaps that might exist. I was a fairly disengaged boy in high school. I thought most classes were ridiculously boring and unengaging, and hated homework. I spent too much time online and gaming, in large part because my own suburban neighborhood in Avon was completely unwalkable and lacked third spaces. It wasn’t until I became an engineering major in college that I really thrived academically with the hands-on nature of my education. I think we should uplift boys and young men and address unique challenges they might face, in a similar way that we do for girls.

Thanks to everyone who has made it this far. As you all might have figured out over the last few years … I’m verbose. But I hope you can see that I have a vision for our town. I want the voters of West Hartford to know that I have real, achievable, evidence-based plans and a focus on meaningful results. Vote for me or not, you know what I stand for.

If your child feels a little safer going to school this year, please know that I’ve fought hard for traffic calming in school zones, and I’m going to keep fighting for more.

If you’re teaching your kid to ride a bike and wish cars didn’t come so fast down your street, know that I’m going to fight for you and your kid. You can contact me, I will show up on your street, see the problem for myself, and work with you on solutions.

If you talk around the dinner table with your adolescent about how to face an uncertain future, know that I’m going to fight for him or her.

If you yourself are a young West Hartford resident and are struggling to find a way into our challenging housing market, to start a family and build a life here, I’m going to fight for you.

Finally, if you are a young parent and look at our current entrenched, comfortable leadership and you don’t see a single other young parent – I’m here to fight for you.

Thank you all.

Jason Wang
West Hartford
(Jason Wang is a Republican candidate running for election to the West Hartford Town Council)