Billionaire Barry Sternlicht, chairman and chief executive officer of the investment behemoth Starwood Capital Group, sent shivers down the spines of Fairfield County Realtors last year when he declared that Greenwich may be one of the worst housing markets in the U.S.

"You can't give away a house in Greenwich," said Sternlicht, complaining how he couldn't sell his 5.8-acre gated Greenwich estate.

High income taxes made all of Fairfield County a "terrible place" to live, Sternlicht was quoted saying by Bloomberg News. He has moved to Florida, where there is no income tax.

Sternlicht's pronouncement of course shouldn't have been a great surprise to Fairfield County Realtors, who have been living the sluggish real estate market for quite a while. What must have been a kick in the stomach was having that fact come rolling off the tongue of a real estate titan, quoted by a leading business news service.

Indeed, the sad reality of declining demand for Fairfield County estates, and falling prices, has certainly been the chatter in golf club locker rooms there for some time.

Last Sunday, in its real estate section, The New York Times offhandedly offered, in a story about the blistering hot real estate market in New York and New Jersey suburbs immediately adjacent to Manhattan, a bleak assessment about Fairfield County. The median price for the top 10 percent of sales there dropped by more than 15 percent in the last quarter of 2016, the newspaper reported, characterizing it as a "sluggish high-end market."

Business development groups in Greenwich and Weston, two of Connecticut's most prominent super estate suburbs, have responded with public relations campaigns to try to perk up sales, The Times said.

Most of us probably won't be kept up at night worrying about the fact that two-bedroom apartments in Manhattan's Tribeca now sell for many more millions than Greenwich mansions. But the declining appeal of Fairfield County to the rich should concern all of us in Connecticut because the income taxes paid by those wealthy residents have been a crucial crutch to the state budget.

When billionaires like Sternlicht pick up stakes and move to Florida they can perceptibly move Connecticut's revenue needle, in the wrong direction. And when others don't come to replace them, that's a lot of storm clouds on Connecticut's already-dark budget horizon.

When state government is dominated by representatives beholden to public employee unions — the speaker of the house is literally employed by the union — the rich must be feeling queasy about the prospects of future tax increases.

The unions have plainly called for higher taxes on the rich. Most of those people are not stupid. That's how a lot of them made all that money.

Another headwind here is the broader cultural trend toward urban living, away from leafy, car-oriented suburbs. Alana Semuels, in an insightful piece last year in The Atlantic, focused on Connecticut to explain this phenomena, citing moves by both General Electric and Pfizer away from suburban Connecticut.

Her story noted that median home prices in Fairfield County are down 21 percent from their peak in 2003, according to Zillow. In contrast, prices are down just 5 percent nationwide from their 2004 peak.

Semuels quotes a 27-year-old from Groton, a graduate of the University of Connecticut, who moved to San Francisco because Connecticut was "boring" and did not support his hip, "polyamorous" lifestyle.

I'm not sure there is much Connecticut can do to make suburban and small-citied Connecticut more appealing to millennials who feel the draw of bright lights and big cities, even with a culture more accepting of the polyamorous.

But the moribund real estate market in Fairfield County should be a stark warning to lawmakers that more income tax is sure to help further strangle the state's golden goose.

This is the opinion of David Collins

d.collins@theday.com