Last month, Connecticut’s Open Communities Alliance (OCA) released its most recent Resource Equity data map, showing which Connecticut municipalities it believes need the most state investment. First created in 2009 by the Kirwan Institute, OCA has updated the map every five to six years. Prior to the 2026 edition, the OCA’s most recent update was in 2020.
“A core piece of building better policy is data, not just for the sake of data, but so that we can ground ourselves in the reality in which we live,” said Jennifer Quaye-Hudson, OCA’s Advocacy Director. “This resource equity map has the potential to put power back into the hands of families to make the decisions that are right for them; to allow families to access healthcare, education, housing, and other resources that they deem important, so that they may lead rich and dignified lives.”
The OCA is a non-profit civil rights organization focused primarily on reforming state housing policy and reducing the impact of historic redlining practices. The tool was unveiled during a presentation held on Oct. 8, where OCA representatives and other housing stakeholders expounded on the tool’s purpose, explained the data behind it, and showed its uses for both policymakers and state residents.
The map breaks down the state by census tract and provides a score for each on OCA’s Resource-Equity index, a criterion the organization created by analyzing seven metrics across the categories of education, employment and neighborhood factors, and then by comparing each tract’s metric to the state average. The OCA pulled median incomes from the U.S. Census data and pulled school district performance data from the State’s Department of Education to determine a census tract’s education score; it pulled unemployment data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Job Access scores, as determined by an index created by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, to determine a census tract’s employment score; it pulled homeownership data and poverty rates from the Census Bureau and used CT Data Haven’s Community Wellbeing Survey to determine neighborhood scores.
Camille Seaberry, a Data Haven researcher who helped collect data for the project, explained the Job Access scores and the Community Wellbeing Survey in greater depth. Seaberry said the Center for Neighborhood Technology measures “all the jobs in an area, how far away you are from jobs near you” and measures “the diversity of different types of jobs” to see how well an area can accommodate workers in all industries. The Community Wellbeing Survey, Seaberry explained, is a statewide questionnaire that surveys residents on “a variety of public health and quality of life sorts of things.” Seaberry explained that the metric was used over crime rates because it allows residents to directly relay their perception of how safe their neighborhoods feel.
“For this question, we ask, ‘Do you feel safe walking at night in your neighborhood?’” said Seaberry. “Using a survey question like this, you’re directly asking people how they feel about their neighborhood and how safe they feel in their neighborhood, which might not be the same as on-paper [data] from a police department, of [the] numbers of crimes in an area.”
Victoria Oswald, OCA’s policy and data analyst, explained that the map allows users not only to see each census tract’s Resource-Equity scores, but to filter based on all of the underlying metrics that go into it. Additionally, users can toggle race and ethnicity overlays, which Oswald said was important to include to “show where people of color are having access to resources in the state and where we need to expand access to resources.”
Oswald said the data shows that while people of color in Connecticut are still disproportionately housed in lower resource areas, they do have “relatively good access to a number of jobs and diversity of jobs based on the job access score.” She also noted that there has been a slight reduction in the percentage of Connecticut residents of color living in low-resource areas over the past decade; as of 2026, 67% of non-Hispanic black and 65% of Hispanic people live in low opportunity areas, while in 2015, those percentages were 73% and 72%, respectively.
“Even though it’s not much, we find this [to be] a step in the right direction in terms of expanding access to socioeconomic resources for people of color in Connecticut,” said Oswald.
Corrie Betts, President of Hartford’s NAACP Chapter, said the map shows that Connecticut is “still dealing with a big issue” in terms of racial disparities.
“I think it just puts emphasis on how much more work needs to be done within our communities to be making sure that it’s equitable around all parts of the state of Connecticut,” said Betts.
Betts also said that while the map is useful for helping working-class or disenfranchised Connecticut residents make informed decisions about where to live, lawmakers should use it to determine where greater investments could be made, to ensure people move because they want to, not because they feel they have to.
“I don’t think individuals should be leaving their community because it’s not equitable in those communities,” said Betts. “Let’s make sure we’re investing in places so that if folks do want to leave — that’s their prerogative — but they’re not leaving because the resources aren’t in their communities.”
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