What is your neighborhood’s experience with income inequality?

“NewsWorks Tonight” host Dave Heller recently spoke with one of the authors of a study that identifies Philadelphia as the city with the most rapid growth in income segregation in the last 40 years. Does this bear out in your experience?

 

“NewsWorks Tonight” host Dave Heller recently spoke with one of the authors of a study that identifies Philadelphia as the city with the most rapid growth in income segregation in the last 40 years. Rich and poor are increasingly separating themselves into different neighborhoods.

 

Listen to the interview above.

Do you see evidence of this income inequality in the city? Has it been a burden to you, your family, or your friends—or have you been able to overcome it somehow?

Tell us in the comments belowwhat you’ve experienced.

Stanford University Education and Sociology Professor Sean Reardon told Heller that he thinks a combination of housing market dynamics and rising income inequality are two of the main factors for this change.

As the middle class shrank over the course of the 38-year study, he explains, neighborhoods become more concentrated as relatively high- or low-income. With booms in the housing market, middle-class families were priced out of certain neighborhoods, and more affluent people bought up the property. Conversely, as those middle-class families move into less-expensive neighborhoods, those parts of town tended toward higher levels of poverty.

Over time, Reardon said, with fewer mixed-income neighborhoods and less interaction across the wealth divide, public trust is eroded and political polarization sets in.

Have you seen this bear out in your lifetime? How has your neighborhood changed? 

You can read the study: “Growth in the Residential Segregation of Families by Income, 1970-2009“