Where the wealthy and poor live
Curious where the 1 percent live? Turns out the Baltimore area has a fair amount -- or, at least, a fair amount of the top 3 percent of income earners, which is as close as a Brookings Institution fellow was able to get with available IRS data.
Howard Wial, director of Brookings' Metropolitan Economy Initiative, wrote in an Atlantic Cities piece that Baltimore is one of just 20 metro areas that have at least 1 percent of the country's households with $200,000-plus incomes. Top of the list, to no one's shock: New York.
Meanwhile, a report from Brown University's US2010 Project finds that the poor and well-to-do are increasingly isolated in their own neighborhoods, and those islands of poverty and wealth are growing as the number of middle-class neighborhoods is shrinking.
Just over 30 percent of families in large and medium-sized metro areas lived in neighborhoods at either income extreme in 2007, up from 15 percent in 1970, according to the report. (The Baltimore region was at nearly 30 percent in 2007, but the report doesn't give its '70 statistic.)
"These trends are consequential because people are a ffected by the character of the local areas in which they live," write the report's authors, from Stanford University. "The increasing concentration of income and wealth (and therefore of resources such as schools, parks, and public services) in a small number of neighborhoods results in greater disadvantages for the remaining neighborhoods where low- and middle-income families live."
Thoughts?
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Comments
Combined with low class mobility, this means there are increasing numbers of young rich folks who truly have no idea how the poor live. Where have you gone, Jacob Riis?
Posted by: Cheap Jim | November 23, 2011 8:22 AM
The nature of the rich/poor segregation differs by city. Here in Baltimore, neighborhoods can be often be fairly easily classified as 'rich' or 'poor' but they are dispersed throughout the city, with the poor and rich living within blocks of each other. By contrast, in more modern, sprawling cities like Houston, the rich increasingly live in private gated communities that are physically separated from the poor by highways and transportation.
Posted by: direwolfc | November 23, 2011 11:09 AM
@direwolfc- Your post reminded me a few years back a buddy of mine joked you can tell the income levels of light rail riders by where they board. Very few white people get on at Lexington Market. They will walk down to First Mariner Arena and usually sit towards the front of the train. I thought this was interesting when she said this. She was a U of MD nursing Director I think. I miss her before I transferred to DC. We had some great conversations.
Posted by: KL | November 23, 2011 11:51 AM
First of all i would like to wish a Happy Thanksgiving to Jamie Smith Hopkins and all of her readers
Secondly i would agree with comment #2 by direcwolfc
And i would add that sometimes it gets even more complicated than that. in Baltimore.
A few years back a guy from Baltimore got in trouble for publicly supporting Obama's plans for CHIP [a health program] Conservative pundits made a big deal out of the fact that the guy lived in a "rich " neighborhood [Fells Point]where houses sold for $500,000.
But anyone that knows Baltimore knows how complicated the real estate market is here
I paid $45,000 for my house in Highlandtown.A year later someone paid $350,000 to live two doors down from me. Obviously, thier house is rehabbed and mine isnt.But both of our houses are the exact same size and only a few feet from each other.
Becauseof these factors, there are many neighborhoods where houses may sell for as much as $500,000, that still have large amounts of lower income people with blue collar jobs
Because mostof Baltimore's gentrification happened in [formerly]blue collar white areas , it can sometimes be hard to tell apart the gentrifiers from the blue collar residents. Canton is known as a "Rich" area.but there are still blue collar families living there , that either inherited thier houses or bought when houses cost $20,000 there in the 1980s and early 90s
There are extremes in Baltimore. Roland Park is very rich.And partsof West and East Baltimore are very poor.but there are a lot more mixed areas than many people realise
Posted by: Pete from Highlandtown | November 24, 2011 8:07 PM