Washington: A world apart

November 09, 2013
The Washington Post

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Although the wealthiest Americans have always lived in their own islands of privilege, sociologists and demographers say the degree to which today’s professional class resides in a world apart is a departure from earlier generations. People of widely different incomes and professions commonly lived close enough that they mingled at stores, sports arenas and school. In an era in which women had fewer educational and professional opportunities, lawyers married secretaries and doctors married nurses. Now, lawyers and doctors marry each other.

A recent analysis of census data by sociologists Sean Reardon of Stanford and Kendra Bischoff of Cornell highlighted how middle-income neighborhoods have been fading away as more people live in areas that are either poor or affluent.

In 1970, 65 percent of families lived in middle-income neighborhoods; four decades later, 42 percent did.

Meanwhile, the share of families living in affluent neighborhoods doubled, from 7 percent to 15 percent, as did families living in poor neighborhoods, from 8 percent to 18 percent.

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Mentioned Publications

Kendra Bischoff

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Sean F. Reardon

Every city or metropolitan area in the U.S. has higher- and lower-income neighborhoods. The extent to which these neighborhoods differ in their average socioeconomic status, however, varies considerably. Moreover, this socioeconomic residential sorting has grown substantially in the last 40 years (Reardon and Bischoff 2011a; Reardon and Bischoff 2011b; Watson 2009); the bulk of that growth occurred in the 1980s and in the 2000s.

We refer to the uneven geographic distribution of families of different income levels within a metropolitan area as “family income segregation” or, more simply, “income segregation.” Our use of the term “segregation” is descriptive; it denotes the extent to which families of different incomes live in different neighborhoods; it does not imply any particular cause of these residential patterns. We focus on the segregation of families by income primarily because children generally live in family households. Segregation is likely more consequential for children than for adults for two reasons. First, most children spend a great deal of time in their neighborhood, making that immediate context particularly salient for them, while adults generally work and socialize in a larger geographic area. Second, for children, income segregation can lead to disparities in crucial public amenities, like schools, parks, libraries, and recreation.

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Sean F. Reardon

,

Kendra Bischoff

As overall income inequality grew in the last four decades, high- and low-income families have become increasingly less likely to live near one another. Mixed income neighborhoods have grown rarer, while affluent and poor neighborhoods have grown much more common. In fact, the share of the population in large and moderate-sized metropolitan areas who live in the poorest and most affluent neighborhoods has more than doubled since 1970, while the share of families living in middle-income neighborhoods dropped from 65 percent to 44 percent. The residential isolation of the both poor and affluent families has grown over the last four decades, though affluent families have been generally more residentially isolated than poor families during this period. Income segregation among African Americans and Hispanics grew more rapidly than among non-Hispanic whites, especially since 2000. These trends are consequential because people are affected by the character of the local areas in which they live. The increasing concentration of income and wealth (and therefore of resources such as schools, parks, and public services) in a small number of neighbor-hoods results in greater disadvantages for the remaining neighborhoods where low- and middle-income families live.

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