Income Segregation: Stay Out of Bridgeport

A research group from Stanford has just issued a new study called “Residential Segregation of Families by Income: 1970 – 2009.” The cities with the highest level of income segregation are familiar. They are also on nearly every list of metropolitan areas with low income, high poverty, low education attainment, high unemployment and falling home values. This list of cities like Detroit, Bridgeport, Newark and Memphis can be passed around to any and all research groups who mean to show what has happened between America’s rich and poor over the past several decades. These problems cannot be fixed nationally unless they are fixed in the local areas where they are the worst. There is no evidence that is happening.

The Stanford segregation survey reports that:

In every city or metropolitan area in the U.S., there are some neighborhoods inhabited primarily by families with above-average income and wealth, and other neighborhoods that are home primarily to families with below average income and wealth. The extent to which neighborhoods within a city or metropolitan area differ in their average income levels, however, varies considerably among U.S. metropolitan areas. More importantly, the extent of this economic variation among neighborhoods has grown substantially over the last 40 years.

The cities on this list, and most like it, are either the old industrial cities of the north and Midwest or areas of border states like Texas and California where there are many immigrants who make very little money. Fresno and Modesto are on almost all of these lists. So are Syracuse and Rochester, cities that once were home to great companies passed by as the service economy overtook the industrial one.

Among all the proposals to move the 99% closer to the 1% in terms of income or opportunity, what is rarely mentioned is that it is probably easier to help a poor person in Greenwich, Conn., than it is in Buffalo, N.Y. Nearly everyone in Greenwich is rich. A few people in Buffalo are as well, but the imbalance is startling. Buffalo’s tax base is gone, even if every millionaire there pays his entire income to the city.

“Residential Segregation of Families by Income: 1970 – 2009” can be thrown on the pile of studies by Brookings, Pew and the U.S. government. They all read about the same, because the problems they describe remain almost entirely local to a relatively few areas of the country.

Douglas A. McIntyre