The US Cities With The Highest Levels of INCOME Segregation (Atlanta: low income, 2014)

[glovenyc]

I wonder where our fair metro places on this list. The articles is about INCOME (not racial) segregation, so let's not turn this into a black/white thing, por favor.



The U.S. Cities With the Highest Levels of Income Segregation - Richard Florida - The Atlantic Cities

[demonta4]

Honestly, I don't care about income segregation anymore. Let people live where they want. The friendliest people I've ever seen have low incomes, and I hate how people say all we bring is crime. The one thing I do hate is racial segregation, but this isn't apparent in Atlanta. Just look at Clayton and Gwinnett demographics.

[neil0311]

If people are free to live where they want, what more can you ask or do you want?

There will inherently be some "segregation" based on incomes, given property values tend to be similar in an area, and in many areas there are fewer apartments.

I'm not sure I get the problem, although the term "segregation" tends to have a racial undertone. Even though "it's not about race"....you know where they're going.

[mrdkb]

Originally Posted by demonta4

. The one thing I do hate is racial segregation, but this isn't apparent in Atlanta. Just look at Clayton and Gwinnett demographics.

Can you elaborate

[waronxmas]

I really don't understand why this is as "insidious" (the article's words) as it being made to seem. City districts since the beginning of time have been setup this way and I don't really see it changing. The only thing that has changed since the middle part of last century is that legal racial and ethnic segregation has been outlawed.

It used to be, for example, that if you were say Black or Jewish and middle class you could only live in the Black or Jewish neighborhood with everyone else including the poor folks. When Jim Crow and redlining were abolished, those upwardly mobile Black and Jewish (and everyone else affected by those laws) did the obvious thing: moved to middle and upper income neighborhoods since they were no longer forced to live in a ghetto.

A great example of this in daily life is Sweet Auburn. You can go there today and see how a upper income family like the Kings had a big Victorian house right across the alley from a shanty. The moment they no longer had to have (and others like them) that living situation, the bolted to the new suburban neighborhoods on the Westside. The same thing was repeated in cities across the country. Perhaps the author isn't familiar with this little tid bit of American history.

[ElleKaye]

Originally Posted by glovenyc

I wonder where our fair metro places on this list. The articles is about INCOME (not racial) segregation, so let's not turn this into a black/white thing, por favor.



The U.S. Cities With the Highest Levels of Income Segregation - Richard Florida - The Atlantic Cities

From the link:

"...You would think that income segregation would be higher in more affluent metros. But income segregation is only weakly associated with average wages (.14) and not significantly related to either per capita income or economic output per person. This result is curious and a bit counterintuitive. In part, this could be because average wages and income say little about the distribution of money across a region’s residents.


It is therefore important to note that income segregation is much more closely associated with income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient (with a correlation of .54). Income inequality explains roughly 28 percent of the variation in income segregation, according to the simple regression analysis Mellander conducted. In other words, income segregation is more closely related to the gap between the rich and the poor (captured by income inequality) than the overall level of development or affluence (measured by income, wages or economic output per capita)..."


Aside from not agreeing with the first sentence, I'm not even sure what's being said in the second paragraph.



Why would I expect income segregation to be higher in a more affluent metro? If most of the people in the metro are affluent, then how segregated could the living conditions be? Everyone has to live somewhere so if you have more rich than poor people crammed into the same space, then of course there will be a pretty good variety of mix.