Redefining Urban and Suburban America: Evidence from Census 2000

The Shape of the Curve: Household Income Distributions in U.S. Cities, 1979-99

The notion of cities as centers of the American melting pot is well rooted in our nation’s history and popular consciousness. As much as places where people of different races and ethnicities mix, cities have long been portrayed as bringing the wealthy, the middle class, and the poor together within their borders.1 Of course just because individuals of different means have lived in cities does not mean that they have necessarily interacted. Poor Eastern European immigrants reaching Ellis Island at the turn of the twentieth century, and blacks moving to the Northeast during the Great Migration, did not move in next door to J. P. Morgan. Indeed sharp contrasts between pockets of poverty and wealth characterize most cities. In fact over the latter part of the twentieth century, the number of extremelypoorcommunitiesintheUnitedStatesrosedramatically,withmost concentrated within central cities.2 This trend owed to policies and economic and social forces that confined growing poor, mostly black, populations to urban centers, including: the physical concentration of subsidized housing in 195 The Shape of the Curve Household Income Distributions in U.S. Cities, 1979–99 A L A N B E R U B E A N D T H A C H E R T I F F A N Y 7 The authors thank Jared Bernstein, Matthew Fellowes, William Frey, Amy Liu, Janet Pack, Kathleen Short, Audrey Singer, and Rebecca Sohmer for advice and comments, and Mark Muro for his editorial and substantive contributions. 1. Sir Peter Hall notes, “It is not just that big cities have more people living in them; it is that they contain so many different kinds of people, different in birthplace and race and social class and wealth, different indeed in every respect that differentiates people at all, living in almost infinitely complex social relationships” (1998). 2. Jargowsky (1997). the urban core; exclusionary zoning and racial discrimination that impeded the movement of lower-income and minority families into the suburbs; stagnating wages for less-skilled urban workers; and the economic distress accompanying rising rates of single parenthood in inner cities.3 The resulting conditions, it is argued, helped prompt the “flight” of many middle- and upper-income, mostly white, families to rapidly developing suburbs and beyond.4 Nevertheless recent trends have not rendered cities home to the poor alone. Although poverty rates in central cities remain higher than those elsewhere , some of the nation’s wealthiest households inhabit places like San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, Boston’s Beacon Hill, and Manhattan’s Upper East Side.5 Downtowns across the nation are newly crowded with luxury housing and amenities tailored for higher-income residents.6 Meanwhile the number of extremely poor communities dropped significantly during the 1990s, most dramatically in central cities.7 Amid the turbulence at the high and low ends of the scale, however, most observers agree that a steady decline in the size of the urban middle class has occurred in recent decades. As early as 1961, author Jane Jacobs observed: “To be sure, cities are losing their middle-class populations.”8 In subsequent decades, a growing chorus of urban researchers has echoed this concern.9 Without these households, it is argued, struggling city neighborhoods lack positive role models for children; public schools labor to educate an increasingly disadvantaged population; and key middle-income workers like police officers, nurses, and teachers lose connections to the communities they serve. Middle-income earners may form an important part of a city’s fiscal base by contributing revenues that the poor cannot, while allowing the city to keep tax rates on wealthier households and businesses competitive with those in surrounding jurisdictions. They may also bolster civic engagement, providing a bridge between the concerns of lower-income and higherincome residents. Finally the presence of poor and wealthy households, and a lack of middle-income households, may lead to higher prices for all city consumers.10 196 Alan Berube and Thacher Tiffany 3. Wilson (1987); Massey and Denton (1993). 4. Frey and Fielding (1995). 5. See Berube and Frey, chapter 4, this volume. 6. Haya El Nasser, “Downtowns Make Cities Winners.” USA Today, May 27, 2001, p. 3A. 7. See Jargowsky, chapter 5, this volume. 8. Jacobs (1961). 9. Leone (1976); Ladd (1993); McMahon, Angelo, and Mollenkopf (1998); Michael Hill, “Is It Too Late for Cities?” Baltimore Sun, December 8, 2002, p. 1F. 10. Frankel and Gould (2001); Pack (1998). In these...