“It’s definitely a lot easier to make friends and find friends out here,” he told me.

It might not be too big of a jump to suggest that these parts of New England are starting, slightly, to resemble the Rust Belt. Connecticut, for instance, faces $26 billion in unfunded pension liabilities as retirees lived longer and the state failed to contribute an adequate sum. Three of the four major ratings agencies maintain a “negative” outlook on Connecticut’s credit. Manufacturing jobs have been trickling out for years; in cities such as Bridgeport and New Britain, graffiti-covered empty warehouses with broken windows haunt the skyline, reminiscent of Detroit.

Part of the decline has to do with the industries that have left Connecticut, including manufacturing and finance. Nonfarm employment in Connecticut still has not reached its pre-recession peak, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Construction is slumping; manufacturing has lost almost 40,000 jobs in the past decade and gained almost none back; industries such as financial activities and insurance employ thousands of fewer people than they did before the recession. The jobs that are coming back aren’t paying what they used to. In the recession, 57 percent of the jobs Connecticut lost were high-wage jobs, but only 5.7 of the growth in employment since 2010 has been high-wage jobs. Nearly 60 percent of the jobs have been in low-wage industries, according to the Connecticut Office of Policy and Management.

The trend of companies moving to cities also hasn’t helped. Between 1975 and 2005, 90 percent of the jobs created in the New York region, which includes suburban Connecticut and New Jersey, were created outside New York City, according to Chris Jones, chief planner with the Regional Plan Association, a research group that studies the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region. In the last 10 years, 90 percent of the jobs created have been in New York City. In the past decade, New York City has added 600,000 jobs, while the entire rest of the region has added just 88,000. “It’s a reversal of what it was through most of the postwar period,” he said. “You have very slow economic growth and at the same time you have high prices, particularly housing prices” in the suburbs, Jones said.

Of course, the fact that the homes are still so expensive means they have retained some of their value. But they’re not as valuable as they once were—and definitely not as valuable as their owners want them to be. Blackwood is worried because there were only two sales of homes over $4 million this year in the county; there are 40 such homes on the market. And the prices have declined more than in other regions of the country. But, while they are not expensive enough for their owners, they’re far too expensive for the young couples who might be their future residents. “Housing is brutally expensive in Connecticut,” Francese said. “Millennials just say, ‘This is a joke—there’s no reason for me to stay. I can never get paid enough to pay for the house.’” And the towns have resisted adding housing stock that could potentially bring down the costs by adding inventory.