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Most cities it seem have a definite section of the metro area where most of the affluence congregates. NE and N of Atlanta blows the other areas out of the water, for example. My question is, which cities have a coherent ring of at least semi-affluent areas? NYC comes to mind off the top of my head.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cjoseph
Most cities it seem have a definite section of the metro area where most of the affluence congregates. NE and N of Atlanta blows the other areas out of the water, for example. My question is, which cities have a coherent ring of at least semi-affluent areas? NYC comes to mind off the top of my head.
LA, everywhere from Camarillo to Agoura Hills to Calabasas to Brentwood/Palisades to Bel Air/Holmby Hills to Beverly Hills to Santa Monica to Malibu, all upper income
This actually is a good post! Cities tend to invest in one sector or another of the city depending on where the big business lands or generally affluence. Denver I felt was generally cohesive. Atlanta and Dallas are absolutely not. my old home Raleigh, NC was generally equal. This is the broken cog because those neglected area end up rearing all kinds of negatives years later. Houston for such a large city does pretty well. Fort Worth, and Phoenix also fairly even distribution.
Last edited by Taynxtlvl; 06-06-2017 at 07:12 AM..
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I'd say the least lopsided MSA would have to be Washington DC's. Northern Virginia, Maryland and the city proper itself are all very affluent and educated. While NoVA is the most populous and wealthy, all three areas are quite affluent. It's not like the Maryland portion is a big drag on the metro, in terms of wealth. It's also one of the few MSAs that even has black affluence, as every MSA in this country is still grossly uneven when it comes to wealth distribution.
I could drive from suburban Boston to Princeton New Jersey in theory and exclusively drive through zip codes where the median income is near or at 100k a year.
Another one that comes to mind is Minneapolis. The West Side is undoubtedly more affluent, but overall there are wealthy areas all around.
That may be true compared to many metros, but I feel that the northern suburbs are much more blue-collar and middle class than the rest of the metro -- especially the West/Southwest part of the metro (most affluent with access to most of the key lakes).
Cleveland is solidly middle class from east to west, north to south, with pockets of wealth here and there but not strongly congregating any one section of the metro. But there's also extreme poverty in the central/east central part of the metro as well.
There are just some metros where everything is expensive. Those are an anomaly. Most metros with a widely varied economic population are more stratified into financially segregated communities and the wealthier ones tended to get the most public investment decades ago when they were emerging. Conversely, it seems like there are many examples today of rapidly gentrifying areas in both cities and suburbs that had been neglected for many previous decades. Of course, this is usually happening not because the poor and working class are getting richer; they are merely being pushed out.
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