Troubled times here in River City

Article on Greenwich executives encountering financial turmoil . The people described in it sound a lot like many of my friends and acquaintances. Yes, they’ll pull through – they’re capable, tough and resourceful, but not right away and maybe, sad to say, while they still live here in town.

“People don’t like to talk about it,” says Bill, a longtime resident (he asked I not share his last name), “but you can go down almost any street and find people who are struggling.”

Bill, 54, has lived in Greenwich for most of his life. An advertising sales executive I’ve worked with over the years, he was the publisher for one of the many media companies the went belly up in 2008 and ’09. After a tough month or two spent sending out resumes last spring, Bill formed his own independent rep firm. Several months later, he’s signed up a handful of publishers as clients and has pieced together a base salary that would be a comfortable income in most parts of the country, but in Greenwich — with its 280 percent higher cost of living than the average American Zip Code — essentially covers his bills, child support payments, an occasional dinner out at the Bruce Park Grill and not much else.

And a lot of his neighbors are in a similar sleigh. Bill talks of one friend who was laid off from a big job in corporate finance earlier this year who subsequently found employment in a lesser paying part of the sector. Bill estimates that the friend makes a base of $150,000 a year. The man’s wife probably brings in another $90,000. “But you have to understand, that’s probably a tenth of what he was making before. They’ve got three kids in private school, club membership, four cars. Their mortgage alone is probably $25,000 a month. I talked to him the other day and he said. ‘We’re dying. I don’t what we’re going to do. We’re just not making it here.’ I have another friend in real estate, the same thing. The problem is, most of these guys were used to making most of their money on the back end. Now, with the exception of Goldman, Morgan, and the handful of other big places you read about, there is no back-end.”

A New Canaan real estate agent, explaining how dead, dead dead that market is, told a friend that she keeps encountering sellers who insist that “the market’s back”, despite all evidence to the contrary. She attributes that confidence to the personal situation of the speakers – they’re okay, so the rest of the world must be okay too. But while those sellers may not know any people like “Bill”, the agent does, and there are a lot of them in New Canaan. Greenwich, too.

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