Isn’t it ironic? If I have to move again, I will probably end up in the suburbs — because my city, which used to be one of the most affordable on the East Coast — is now too expensive for me to get an apartment:
Concentrated poverty is one of the biggest problems facing cities today, as more of the urban poor become isolated in neighborhoods where the people around them are poor, too. Growing economic segregation across cities, though, is also shaped by a parallel, even stronger force: concentrated wealth.
A new analysis from Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander at the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, which identifies the most and least economically segregated metropolitan areas in the United States, makes clear that economic segregation today is heavily shaped by the choices of people at the top: “It is not so much the size of the gap between the rich and poor that drives segregation,” they write, “as the ability of the super-wealthy to isolate and wall themselves off from the less well-to-do.”
Florida and Mellander created an index of economic segregation that takes into account how we’re divided across metro areas by income, but also by occupation and education, two other pillars of what we often think of as socioeconomic status. Among the largest metros in the country, Austin ranks as the place where wealthy, college-educated professionals and less-educated, blue-collar workers are least likely to share the same neighborhoods.
[…]
Before calculating their combined index, Florida and Mellander also looked at separate measures of segregation by income, education and occupation, and an interesting pattern arises across all three. Within a given region, such as Washington, we can think about income segregation, for example, in at least two ways: To what degree are the wealthy isolated from everyone else? Or to what degree are the poor concentrated in just a few parts of town? The wealthy can be highly segregated in a metro area (occupying just a few neighborhoods), even while the poor are pretty evenly dispersed (with low segregation).
The interesting pattern: By income, the wealthy (households making more than $200,000 a year) are more segregated than the poor (families living under the federal poverty line). By education, people with college degrees are more segregated than people with less than a high school diploma. By occupation, the group that Florida has coined the “creative class” is more segregated than the working class.
The problem of economic segregation, in other words, isn’t simply about poor people pushed into already-poor neighborhoods — it’s even more so about the well-off choosing to live in places where everyone else is well-off, too. In fact, of all the different forms of segregation that Mellander and Florida examined, the segregation of the wealthy was the most severe.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” Just don’t even try to settle this wretched refuse in Society Hill or Chestnut Hill.
America has become the very country that it fought a revolution to free itself from.
Thanks 1%.
“it’s even more so about the well-off choosing to live in places where everyone else is well-off, too”
Of course you don’t want to invest in real estate in an area that’s not appreciating in value. So sort of a “duh” I think with some of that.
I spent my teenage years living and going to school in areas of Atlanta that I can’t afford to live in now as an adult. Most of the affluent suburban communities here are now their own “cities” with private government. They don’t want to subsidize the inner-urban city center. They don’t even want the football stadium to be downtown anymore. It’s a new kind of white flight. Very sad and shameful. In a way I’m glad I don’t live in those neighborhoods anymore.