The U.S. cities with the highest levels of income segregation (cites Sean Reardon's research)

This is the first post in a five-part series examining economic segregation in U.S. metros

Debates in the U.S. over income inequality have taken center stage in recent years, but its existence in our cities is of long standing. Major metro areas have been magnets for both the rich and the poor since ancient times; in fact they owe a great deal of their dynamism to their economic and social diversity. But growing economic segregation—the increasing tendency of affluent people to live in neighborhoods where almost everyone else is affluent, and poor people to live in neighborhoods where almost everyone else is poor—may be a more insidious problem. The emergence of a new urban geography of concentrated wealth and advantage juxtaposed to endemic poverty and concentrated disadvantage poses troubling implications for the economic mobility of people and the economic health of cities.

Just as lower-skill, higher-pay manufacturing jobs have dropped out of the labor market, and work in America has bifurcated into high-skill, high-paying professional and knowledge occupations and much lower-paying, low-skill service jobs in fields like food service and retail trade, America’s once middle-class neighborhoods have also begun to disappear.

In 1970, roughly two-thirds (65 percent) of Americans lived in neighborhoods that could be described as middle income; today that number is just slightly more than four in ten (42 percent), according to a study by Cornell University’s Kendra Bischoff and Sean Reardon of Stanford University. Over the same time span, the proportion of families living in affluent neighborhoods rose from 7 to 15 percent, and the share living in poor neighborhoods increased from 8 to 18 percent. The share of Americans living at both extremes grew from 15 percent in 1970 to 33 percent in 2009. Income segregation grew in nearly nine in ten of all U.S. metros with populations over 500,000 people, according to the study. A 2012 report by the Pew Research Center found economic segregation of upper- and lower-income households to have risen in in 27 of America’s 30 largest metros.

Read the full story in The Atlantic.

Listen to an interview with Prudence Carter and Sean Reardon on the opportunity gap on Bloomberg.