Only inertia keeps Connecticut expensive.
Electricity costs too much. Housing is out of reach. The tax code asks the least of the people who have the most. Every one of these has a fix that has already been written and argued over. Build the Future works to elect the people who will finally pass them.
All 151 districts
Find your district. Meet the Democrat running in it.
Every district in the Connecticut House, and who holds it right now. Tap a district on the map, or search by town, district number, or representative.
What we're working on
Four places to start.
Connecticut is one of the most expensive states in the country to live in. Housing, food, energy, transportation, health insurance, child care — the cost of nearly all of it has close to doubled over the last fifteen years, while household income has not kept pace with inflation. These four are where we are focused.
Fixing these problems requires will, and being steadfast against entrenched interests. Build the Future works to elect people who are ready for these fights.
Electricity you can afford
Connecticut households pay some of the highest electric rates in the country. Public power is cheaper everywhere it exists — families served by publicly owned utilities pay 30 to 40 percent less than customers stuck with an investor-owned monopoly. Six Connecticut towns already run their own, and Nebraska runs an entire state on it. This is not a radical idea. It is what we should build toward.
Housing within reach
Housing costs are dramatically outpacing incomes. Connecticut is short of homes people can afford, and tenants lack basic protections. Teachers, nurses, and tradespeople increasingly can't live in the towns where they work.
Schools funded like they matter
Connecticut is among the best states in the country for public education and among the worst for racial equality within it. School funding leans so heavily on local property taxes that a town's wealth decides the quality of its schools. Every child in every zip code deserves the same shot.
A tax code that isn’t upside down
The wealthiest 4,500 people in Connecticut pay under 8% of their income in state and local taxes. Everyone else pays close to three times that. For decades the state has deprived municipalities of what they need, and towns have covered the difference with property taxes — a wealth tax on the middle class that the wealthy barely feel.
Why numbers matter
Connecticut has a part-time legislature.
5 and 3
Months in session. January to June in odd years, February to May in even ones. The rest of the year the legislature is not meeting.
$43,600
Base pay for a state representative. Almost everyone in the building holds another job.
3 or 4
Representatives sharing a single staffer. The nonpartisan offices do great work, but elected officials here do not have the personal staff that members of full-time legislatures elsewhere in the country do.
None of this is built for taking on entrenched interests. A legislature like this one moves only when enough of its members walk in already knowing what they came to do, and already willing to do it. That is what this work is about — electing enough people who are rowing in the same direction.
Who pays what
The wealthiest 4,500 people in Connecticut pay a smaller share of their income than the rest of us do.
Share of income paid in combined state and local taxes — nearly three times the rate. Connecticut's top earners take home more than 37 times what the bottom 99% do. The state's own tax incidence report, which the Department of Revenue Services is required by statute to produce, finds the system regressive overall, with the property tax the most regressive piece of it.
What this is
We elect fighters for working families.
Build the Future is a Connecticut political action committee guided by fairness and intent on fixing bad systems. We work to elect people to the state legislature who treat the cost of living here as the emergency it is, and who will vote that way once they get to Hartford.
There are 151 seats in the Connecticut House and 36 in the Senate, and every one of them is on the ballot every two years. Most people don't know which district they live in, let alone who represents them or who is running against them. That's most of why the map above exists.
We are not a campaign and we are not going away after November. The work is finding good candidates in all 169 towns, helping them win, and holding on to what gets built.
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This work costs money.
Every dollar goes toward electing Democrats who understand how severe this problem is, and who treat fixing it as both important and urgent. The more people in that building who know we are in a crisis, the faster we get to solutions.