Downgraded to ninth place by Connecticut Magazine

By Lloyd Garrison

Over the past decade, Connecticut Magazine has placed Norfolk among the state’s top five Best Small Towns Under 3,500, and Norfolk has been named number one twice in a row.
Coming in to 2012, it looked like Norfolk was still on a roll. A total of 24 of the state’s smallest towns are rated every other year, and the magazine’s last poll, in 2010, rated Norfolk number two. This year, it slipped to ninth. Among neighboring towns, Norfolk was beaten by Colebrook (7) and just edged out Cornwall (10).

What went wrong? The answer is buried in the statistics that weigh a town’s attributes across five categories: education, crime, economy, cost and leisure. Norfolk placed well in education (4.5), and with its celebrated library, restaurants, cafes, Chamber Music Festival and Infinity Hall, not to mention its several state parks, it scored sixth in leisure. But Norfolk’s taxes put it in eighteenth place in cost, and it came in seventeenth in crime.

Lyme, the coastal town overlooking both Long Island Sound and vast salt marshes, was close to being the most expensive place to live, but it made it to the top this year with relatively low crime, a first in education and a third in leisure. The top five included Hartland, Union, Eastford and Bridgewater.

Does it matter?

“I had the Best Small Towns rating on my Web site when Norfolk was number one,” says Norfolk realtor Betsy Little. “But people looking to buy in Norfolk seem to already know why they want to live here.”

Tom McGowan of Elyse Harney brushed off the ninth place finish. “It is not going to affect our real estate market,” he says, still basking in his recent sale of Robin Hill on Mountain Road for $3,950,000, a Norfolk record.

“The findings are statistical, not qualitative,” says Patricia Grandjean, the Connecticut Magazine editor who oversees the ratings. “Being ninth doesn’t mean that Norfolk isn’t a nice place live. What separates Norfolk from Lyme could be measured by school test scores that are few percentage points off and one or two more cases of breaking and entering. As for being useful, we hear of young families who look to the survey when casting about for a place with good schools or lower living costs.”