Richard Florida > Grappling with InEquality

kkk

How the 1 Percent Is Pulling America’s Cities and Regions Apart

by Richard Florida 03 April 2019

America’s growing geographic divide derives from economic inequality, especially the tremendous gains of the 1 percent

Blogger Note: Nice to see that Richard Florida takes a different approach to Inequality here in America.

_________________________________________________________________________

Coping with America’s escalating regional divide cannot, and will not, happen unless we grapple with the even larger national problem of structural inequality and its causes

_________________________________________________

This growing pattern of spatial inequality can be clearly seen in the maps below.

Commuting zone mean family income relative to the nation, 1980

(Social Forces)

Commuting zone mean family income relative to the nation, 2013

(Social Forces)

The map for 2013 is very different. Now we see many more regions shaded in dark red than before, indicating the mean family income is less than 80 percent of the national level. At the same time, there are many more—and larger—bands of dark blue. 
_________________________________________________________________________
Putting both of these trends together, the share of Americans living in either rich and poor metro areas (those where incomes were either 20 percent higher or lower than the national average) nearly tripled from 1980 and 2013, rising from 12 percent to more than 30 percent. The “middle” is disappearing, as more Americans are in one of the extremes.
But what has produced such staggering growth in spatial inequality? Manduca employs a variety of statistical techniques and counterfactual simulations to parse whether spatial inequality is a product of geographic sorting, or a product of people getting richer and poorer while staying in place..
This suggests that many of the policy strategies advocated to deal with spatial inequality—such as place-based policies to build up lagging places, people-based policies to train them with more skills, or policies to increase housing supply—may help at the margin, but will ultimately not make much of a significant dent in America’s worsening regional divide. That’s because they fail to address a key underlying driver: national income inequality and its geographic consequences, where hugely outsized gains have gone to a very small fraction of America’s places.

_________________________________________________________________________________

READ MORE > City Lab