It is a pleasure and a challenge for me to be back in Hartford again to talk to you about why I believe more growth of both population and economic activity - would be good for the state of Connecticut. The last time I appeared here was in 2001 when I talked about the future of the Hartford region. This time my subject is the whole state's future.

The first step is discussing what kind of growth Connecticut has actually been having from 1990 to 2000, and from 2000 to 2003.

Between the two censuses of 1990 and 2000, your state's total population rose by 118,000 persons, or about 3.6%. The population of the entire U.S. rose by 13.2% in that same period, or 3.6 times as fast. But the population of all of New England grew 5.4%. Every other New England state grew faster than Connecticut.

Ethnic minorities grew much faster than the white population from 1990 to 2000. In fact, non-Hispanic whites declined by 115,000, or 4.2%; whereas Hispanic whites increased by over 100,000, or 50%. All ethnic groups other than non-Hispanic whites increased by 43.9%.

From April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2003, Connecticut's population grew by 77,788 persons, or 2.8 percent, compared to the overall U.S. growth of 3.3 percent. So you were not as far behind the rest of the nation as in the 1990s. However, your growth rate ranked only 26th and was behind New Hampshire, R.I. and Maine.

Exactly half of your growth in this period came from natural increase, vs. 55% in the entire nation. But your rate of natural increase ranked 39th among the 50 states and D.C. The other half of your population growth - about 41,000 people - came from net immigration from abroad. Your native population actually experienced a net out-migration of 9,000 to other parts of the country from 2000 to 2003. But Massachusetts lost more.

Concerning jobs, Connecticut gained 173,500 jobs from the beginning of 1994 to the employment peak in July 2000, a rise of 11.4%. That was larger than your population gain in the same period. But since July 2000, your total jobs have fallen by 63,200, or 3.7%, as of July 2004. In comparison, the entire nation gained about 21% additional jobs from early 1994 to the peak in January 2001, and gained 2.6% since then. These data are not establishments, but surveys.

However you slice it, Connecticut has not done as well as the rest of the nation in adding jobs, either in the 1990s or since 2000. And recently your jobs have not kept up with even your slow increases in population.

The last dimension of growth worth considering is household income. The median household income for 2002-2003 in Connecticut was $54,788, which was slightly below its average in 2001-2002. There were three other states with very slightly higher median incomes in 2002-2003: New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Maryland. But the median for the nation was $43,349, so you were 26.3% over it. That means you are maintaining your position near the top of the national income heap, but your income has not been rising lately, thanks to the recent recession.

To sum it up, Connecticut is a slow-growth state in a slow-growth region of the United States. But it still has among the highest incomes in the nation, probably because it has a lot of luxurious suburbs of the New York financial district.

So why should Connecticut citizens worry about the future? After all, you are a rich state from the viewpoint of median household incomes. So why worry about future growth?

One reason is that many communities in Connecticut have been rejecting offers from large employers to add more jobs. You are more familiar than I am with the particulars, but local resistance to growth is the fastest growing activity in your state. Firms offering to bring thousands of jobs to Connecticut have faced so much local resistance that they have decided to move those jobs somewhere else. You are causing your own slowdown in job levels - a truly self-inflicted wound.

I believe the answer is that every state needs to keep on growing to at least some extent just to stay economically and socially healthy. It is not a matter of pride, but a matter of economic and social necessity. When you stop growing, you starting going backwards. In fact, there are several specific reasons why every state needs to keep growing.

The first reason is that each region's total population grows "naturally" through annual excesses of births over deaths within the existing population. Further development is necessary to house the resulting added people and households.

From 2000 to 2003, your state gained about 12,069 persons per year from natural increase alone. In 2000, your average household size was 2.53 persons so that means you need 4,770 more housing units each year. Allowing for 2 percent overall vacancy, you need 4,867 new units yearly.

The second reason is that some additional development is necessary to replace obsolete and deteriorated homes and other facilities. Connecticut contained 1.386 million housing units in 2000. If the average life of a housing unit is 100 years, you ought to replace at least 1% annually, or 13,860 units just to keep even.

Another need for more housing arises from immigration into the U.S. from abroad. You have been attracting 15,561 foreigners into Connecticut each year since 2000. That indicates a need for 6,150 additional housing units each year, plus all the other types of structures needed to take care of these people.

True, about 2,837 Connecticut citizens per year have been migrating to other parts of the nation from your state. That removes the need for 1,121 homes.

Altogether, Connecticut needs another 23,756 housing units each year to keep even with its sources of population increase and normal aging of its old units. And it also needs all the other types of development required to service that many additional households, such as schools, roads, and stores and other services. That is about the amount of facilities as in a Connecticut city containing over 60,000 persons. That means a whole city like Bristol or West Hartford today.

The construction of all that development provides other benefits to any state that enhance its economic strength, the job opportunities of its residents, and their incomes too. Thus such growth is a key factor that gives a state its vitality and its dynamism.

New development generates jobs and income not only for the new residents, but for the entire community, adding to everyone's prosperity. And new properties expand the tax base, increasing your revenues and ability to supply public services.

The additional people added to the total population, assuming they are basically self-supporting, will generate more sales taxes for state and local governments and more income taxes, thereby further increasing the ability of governments to pay for needed public services, not only for newcomers, but for all existing residents.

Furthermore, a lot of your growth comes through net immigration from abroad, and immigrants are generally younger than the population as a whole. So this will increase the share of young people in your population. Since your existing residents are getting older, and they are going to need more young people to help support them when they retire, especially since everyone is living longer now.

There are also significant advantages of being a region that is of a larger size rather than a smaller size, though Connecticut is certainly not going to become a really big state.

The larger any region becomes, the greater variety of jobs it contains. That makes it a more attractive place for people to live and work. They have more choices of what to do, and both members of married couples can more easily find jobs. This attractiveness may help you stem the current net outflow of existing residents from which you and the entire New England region suffer.

A greater variety of economic activities also increases the competitiveness of any region, makes it less vulnerable to the decline of any one industry like insurance, and makes it easier to attract and retain skilled workers of all types.

When I wrote a book on bureaucracy, I pointed out that every organization comes under pressure to become larger because that gives its most ambitious and talented members more and better chances for advancement. That is also true of regions.

One of the great competitive strengths of your region is that it contains many excellent colleges and universities, especially if you include the entire New England region around Springfield and Boston, as well as Storrs and New Haven. Those institutions will do better if they are part of an economically dynamic and growing region rather than a stagnant or declining one.

Of course, I recognize that growth also has some costs and disadvantages. They should be squarely faced and understood rather than denied. But looking at them carefully will in my opinion show that they are not as bad as many critics believe.

One disadvantage of growth that many people complain about is rising traffic congestion. The more people that any community has, the more likely it is to have more intensive traffic congestion, and not many people enjoy being stuck in traffic.

I know something about this subject, having written two books on it. My most recent is STILL STUCK IN TRAFFIC, available from Brookings.

True, the more growth a region experiences, the more likely it is to experience traffic congestion. The intensity of a region's congestion is highly correlated with its total population, its density, and its prosperity. If you really want to avoid traffic congestion, move to a very small town with low density in the midst of a recession. Try Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan!

As I point out in my book, congestion is inescapable in any large modern metropolitan area. And it will get worse in the future, even if population does not grow, because we keep using our vehicles more often and over greater distances. But that is not all bad. People congregate close together in places they most want to be. It was expressed best by Yogi Berra when he said, "No one goes there any more because it's so crowded."

Other people object to growth when it takes the form of more sprawl because it may absorb more prime farm land or environmentally sensitive land. But this is not really a very powerful argument for several reasons. First, the U.S. has no shortage of prime agricultural land; in fact, we have chronic agricultural surpluses.

Second, New England is full of old stone fences running through the woods. They show where former farms were abandoned when better Midwest land came into production via railroads over 100 years ago. And environmentally sensitive land can be protected from development by proper land use planning. There is really no land shortage in Connecticut.

Another complaint is that growth can cause overcrowding of schools and other public facilities, or add to the taxes of existing residents to pay for more schools. Whether adding more people will force existing residents to pay for the public facilities used by those new people depends upon how local tax structures are designed. It is possible to load all the additional taxes onto the new residents through impact fees, exactions, and development fees. But that is not very wise.

You existing residents need to have newcomers - especially children - so that when you get older, someone younger will be around to help pay your Social Security and Medicare bills. The better educated they are, the higher their incomes will be and the more they can help you.

Therefore, I object to the use of so-called "fiscal zoning" by local cities that causes them to reject all land-uses that do not pay more in taxes than they generate in public costs. Most housing does that, so fiscal zoning causes local governments to discourage housing, especially low-cost housing. Instead, every local government wants more shopping centers and offices.

But you cannot expect the low-or-moderate-wage workers you need to staff your schools, police and fire departments, hospitals, hotels, gas stations, and lawn-care firms to live suspended in mid-air. They have to live somewhere, and the closer they live to you, the less traffic congestion they will generate commuting. So it is in your interest to help such families pay for the public facilities they need to keep on supplying services to you.

Still another complaint about growth is that more traffic that generates more air pollution, and more construction causes water run-off that leads to water pollution or water shortages. But the magnitude of growth Connecticut is likely to experience even in a decade is not the major cause of these ill effects. The major cause is the behavior of people who are already here.

From 1990 to 2000, your population grew only 3.6%. In the U.S. as a whole from 1980 to 2000, when population grew by 24%, total Vehicle Miles Traveled grew 80% because of greater use of vehicles by the existing population. Even if there had been no population growth, VMT would have risen by 47% for that reason. So don't blame pollution on growth.

A final complaint about growth is that the use of eminent domain powers, which means the taking of property by the government, to enable new plants to be built. That is sometimes unfair because it forces people to sell their homes to make room for new jobs. This is a difficult issue with strong arguments on both sides. If there is some unique reason why a specific site is the only one appropriate for a new plant or firm, the local government may want to remove some existing homes to make that plant possible so many added jobs can be created. I cannot render judgments on such cases without knowing the particulars.

Yet laws that permit a few objectors to a growth proposal to sue endlessly even when their own homes are not at stake, can cause long delays in decision-making. This is being exploited by anti-growth forces to prevent firms that want to build plants in Connecticut from doing so. Thus, developers wanted to build a Class A insurance office building in Simsbury that would have provided additional jobs, but it was rejected because it violated at 15-foot setback rule in that city.

There should be changes in the legal procedures that prevent endless appeals from local government decisions from adding enormous costs to development proposals. One appeal should be enough, and it should be expedited by laws requiring speedy decisions by the courts. This problem has cost Connecticut thousands of new jobs in the past few years, and not always for sound reasons. Pfizer wanted to build a laboratory with 1,000 workers in Storrs on a vacant site. But local groups who just wanted the site kept vacant delayed the project to death.

Some opponents of "suburban sprawl" who prefer "smart growth" are using this method to stop any growth at all. Walmart wanted to put a distribution center with 1,000 jobs where there were few jobs, but the land appeal process was used to stop that, and Walmart finally went elsewhere.

"Smart growth" only remains smart when it recognizes that the other word - growth - is essential to regional dynamism. Even those who don't want to grow outward in more sprawl recognize the need to grow inward through higher density. If you don't like higher density and therefore reject "smart growth" AND sprawl, you are espousing a different philosophy: "Dumb stagnation!" You can't show me one culture in history with that philosophy that survived for very long in good health - I don't think there were any!

When it comes to mental health, many Americans recognize they need to keep growing by learning, no matter how old they are, just to stay healthy. That is the origin of the saying, "When you stop growing, you're already dead!" The same thing is true about the economic health of individual enterprises. You have to keep growing and changing to survive. But a similar attitude is appropriate in regard to a region's economy. If it stops growing, and therefore changing, it does not retain its vitality, but becomes stagnant.

Sure, it is easier to reject change and growth and just enjoy what you've already got. But every person's life is a continuous journey from birth until he or she leaves this world, hopefully to grow in another one. On that journey, each person needs to keep moving, keep learning, keep growing - at least mentally, if not in width, like I seem to do! Look at the birds - those that do not get up each day and look for another worm or another seed soon starve and die.

Connecticut's economy and regions are no exceptions to that basic rule of life. It is interesting that much of Western Europe - once the most powerful and dynamic area in the entire world - is losing its dynamism in part because its population has stopped growing, while other parts of the world are getting bigger and stronger.

As the populations of Germany, Italy, Sweden, France, and even Japan stop growing, their citizens get older and older with fewer and fewer young people to support them. Their influence in the world diminishes and so will their living standards if they cannot recapture enough dynamism to keep from shrinking. Those nations are beginning to realize they must accept massive immigration from abroad just to stay healthy. But that immigration will challenge their long-established cultures because the newcomers are mainly Muslims or others with different viewpoints.

Connecticut does not have to accept that same fate. Yours is a state rich in wealth and incomes and natural beauty and education and outstanding citizens. Why shackle your own futures by adopting a rejectionist stance towards change and growth? Some of your citizens may want to do that. But you leaders should recognize the basic need to keep growing and changing to stay healthy and truly alive. I have challenged you here in Hartford before that you need to change in order to dynamic. The same truth applies to your entire state. Don't led the inevitable NIMBY minorities in every town determine your future.

So don't just stand there, do something!! Support more growth! I hope you will grow to accept this advice. Thank you.