An extensive examination by University of Washington geographer Richard Morrill found that the worst economic inequality is largely in the country’s biggest cities, as well as in isolated rural stretches in places like Appalachia, the Rio Grande Valley and parts of the desert Southwest.
Kotkin cites another study by some Harvard researchers in 2013, which found
the highest rates of upward mobility in more sprawling, transit-oriented metropolitan areas like Salt Lake City, small cities of the Great Plains such as Bismarck, N.D.; Yankton, S.D.; Pecos, Texas; and even Bakersfield, Calif.
Kotkin writes that
The most profound level of inequality and bifurcated class structure can be found in the densest and most influential urban environment in North America — Manhattan.
The role of costs is critical here. A 2014 Brookings study showed that the big cities with the most pronounced levels of inequality also have the highest costs: San Francisco, Miami, Boston, Washington, D.C., New York, Oakland, Chicago and Los Angeles. The one notable exception to this correlation is Atlanta. The lowest degree of inequality was found generally in smaller, less expensive cities like Ft. Worth, Texas; Oklahoma City; Raleigh, N.C.; and Mesa, Ariz.
Income inequality has risen most rapidly in the bastion of luxury progressivism, San Francisco, where the wages of the 20th percentile of all households declined by $4,300 a year to $21,300 from 2007-12. Indeed when average urban incomes are adjusted for the higher rent and costs, the middle classes in metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Miami and San Francisco have among the lowest real earnings of any metropolitan area.
Perhaps no place is inequality more evident than in the rural reaches of California, the nation’s richest agricultural state. The Golden State is now home to 111 billionaires, by far the most of any state; California billionaires personally hold assets worth $485 billion, more than the entire GDP of all but 24 countries in the world. Yet the state also suffers the highest poverty rate in the country (adjusted for housing costs), above 23%, and a leviathan welfare state. As of 2012, with roughly 12% of the population, California accounted for roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients.
The vast expanse of economic decline in the midst of unprecedented, but very narrow urban luxury has been characterized as “liberal apartheid. ” The well-heeled, largely white and Asian coastal denizens live in an economically inaccessible bubble insulated from the largely poor, working-class, heavily Latino communities in the eastern interior of the state.
Another example of this dichotomy — perhaps best described as the dilemma of being a “red state” economy in a blue state — can be seen in upstate New York, where by virtually all the measurements of upward mobility — job growth, median income, income growth — the region ranked below long-impoverished southern Appalachia as of the mid-2000s. The prospect of developing the area’s considerable natural gas resources was welcomed by many impoverished small landowners, but it has been stymied by a coalition of environmentalists in local university towns and plutocrats and celebrities who have retired to the area or have second homes there, including many New York City-based “progressives.”
Kotkin goes on the explain that inequality is greatest in the core cities, especially among African Americans and Hispanics, and that inequality is smallest in the suburbs. Read more here.
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