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12. Afterstories The era of deindustrialization recounted in this book was just a moment in the history of the Naugatuck Valley, the NVP, and the individual lives that intersected with them. This chapter follows a few threads of what has happened to them since. The Valley There was no resurrection in the Naugatuck Valley.1 Twenty-five years after the closing of its major industrial employers, it remains a “victim of the Rust Belt.” But life goes on, and the valley has continued to experience major changes in social geography, demography, economy, class, and community life. It has seen residential, commercial, and industrial suburbanization. Now, according to the Central Naugatuck Valley Regional Planning Agency, Waterbury is “changing from a center city surrounded by residential suburbs to a metropolitan area with dispersed employment and homogeneous housing developments.”2 The valley is also seeing a new immigration; nearly one-third of Waterbury’s people now speak a language other than English at home. Between 1970 and today, the economy of the Naugatuck Valley was transformed . The closing of the three major brass companies—American Brass, Chase Brass and Copper, and Scovill Manufacturing—left only a few hundred brass workers where tens of thousands had labored before. Between 1970 and 1998, manufacturing employment in the Waterbury region decreased from about half to about one-quarter of all jobs, due both to the decline of the brass industry and to the general shift from manufacturing to service work in the U.S. economy.3 As industrial employment declined, the region saw a corresponding growth of service jobs from half to three-quarters of its employment. These jobs are highly diverse, ranging from teachers and nurses to janitors and waiters to medical specialists and financial analysts. There is no longer a single type of work or single type of worker that typifies the region’s economy. While service jobs run from very low to very high pay, the overall shift from manufacturing to service employment has resulted in a significant decline in real incomes. Even during the national boom years of the 1990s, the valley continued to lose ground economically. Waterbury’s budget deficit was so deep that the state had to take over its finances. Housing values dropped 25percent during the 1990s. The city entered a cycle of rising residential taxes and residential abandonment that was difficult to reverse. This was part of a broader pattern faced by many though not all cities in the Northeast. In the midst of the collapse of the brass industry in the mid-1970s, Waterbury ’s unemployment rate reached 15percent. In the first years of the twentyfirst century it fell to a rate of around 4–7 percent, far closer to the national average. This is not because there are more jobs in the city of Waterbury, however, but because a growing number of Waterbury residents are taking jobs outside the city, plus a national trend toward decreased participation in the labor force.4 By 2010,the Waterbury labor market had Connecticut’s highest unemployment rate, 12.6percent. Forbes listed it as one of America’s “10 worst cities for jobs.” The city lost 14.7 percent of its jobs between 1998 and 2009. In the summer of 2009, at the pit of the “Great Recession,” the NVP launched a “Listening Campaign” to take the “pulse of the valley.” More than three hundred people participated in focus group–style house meetings to tell their stories about how they are being impacted by economic adversity. A few examples: Our family lost our farm. We had to move in with other family members. I’ve applied for hundreds of jobs that I am well qualified for. They never say it, but I know it’s age discrimination when they don’t hire me, or even grant me an interview. I’m fifty-five years old. We are working under stress and tension, waiting to see who gets laid off next. I am worried and nervous about the crime wave of criminal activity in my neighborhood. My husband and I are working longer hours and are not able to spend much time with our children. We feel this is deteriorating our family relationships. My daughter was attending an after-school program that was recently cut due to lack of funding. Now I have to pay for day care for her. My health care premiums are going through the roof, and my co-pay costs have increased dramatically, too. 204 c h...

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