Driven in part by the Occupy Wall Street protests, America's increasing income inequality has become a prominent storyline in recent months. Now, a new report shows that as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, they are also physically distancing themselves from each other.
The findings come from a new report from US2010, a program that researches changes in American society. From 1970 to the late 2000s, there was a dramatic increase in income segregation—the uneven distribution of families of different income levels within metropolitan areas. According to census data, income segregation doubled over this period; in 1970, 15 percent of families were in neighborhoods either classified as affluent (with median incomes greater than 150 percent of the median income for their metro areas) or poor (with median incomes less than 67 percent of the metro area median income). By 2007, 31 percent of families lived in "poor" or "affluent" neighborhoods.
"We already kind of knew that segregation by income had been going up from 1970 to 2000, though I was struck by the magnitude of that increase," says Sean Reardon, a professor at Stanford University and one of the report's authors. Since that time, the trend has also been widespread, he adds: "One of the striking findings in the report is that in 90 percent of metropolitan areas, income segregation went up in the 2000s."
© Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
