No, U.S. Cities are not Playgrounds for the Wealthy
A claim I see pop up on Twitter every now and then is that American cities have become “playgrounds for the wealthy”, or at least the young, childless wealthy. This claim often goes uncontested, which seems strange to me, because it’s false by any reasonable logic. Here’s why:
In almost every major metro, the City has a higher poverty rate than the suburbs
Here’s a look at metro poverty rate versus principal city poverty rate in each of the 24 largest MSAs (excluding Riverside-San Bernardino, which is often considered to be a de-facto part of Greater LA).
That diagonal line is the function y=x. You’ll notice a pattern: almost every data point is above the line, meaning that the principal city has a higher poverty rate than the metro area in every instance except for San Diego and Charlotte.
The horizontal line is the national poverty rate. Almost major every city, even “superstar cities” like NYC, DC, and Boston, has a higher poverty rate than the nation as a whole. The exceptions are primarily on the west coast.
In almost every major metro, the City has a lower median income than the suburbs
Here there are three west-coast cities that break the rule, but in every other instance, the core city has a lower median income than the overall metro area. And less than half of these cities have a higher median income than the national median of ~63k.
Major cities have only slightly fewer children than the nation as a whole
Here’s the child population share for each of the 24 cities. The horizontal line is the national child population share of 22.3%. Most cities are below that rate — but not by much. The median is Los Angeles at 20.7%. Even Denver and Minneapolis, two of more wealthy, educated cities on this list, sit at 19.8%, just 2.5% below the national level. The three that really stand out are Boston (15.9%), Seattle (15%) and San Francisco (13.4%).
Few cities fully fit the stereotype
The only cities that hit the trifecta of “higher incomes than the nation, lower poverty than the nation, less children than the nation” are out west: San Francisco, Seattle, Denver and San Diego. No major Sun Belt, Midwest or Northeast cities hit all three criteria.
New York, DC, Boston and Los Angeles are often talked about in the same vein as SF and Seattle, but they all have higher poverty rates than the national average. And while Boston and DC do have low child rates and high incomes, NYC and LA don’t — they both have roughly the same median income as the nation, and only slightly lower child rates.
“But I’m only talking about select neighborhoods”
This caveat has merit to it. There are specific neighborhoods within major cities that are quite wealthy and child-lite. Large swaths of Manhattan, Brooklyn, San Francisco and Seattle are the most prominent examples, but there are many instances in the likes of Boston, DC, Chicago, Denver, Portland and even some Sun Belt cities like Austin and Atlanta.
But I think people overrate what percentage of urban neighborhoods fall under this umbrella, even in Superstar cities. In New York, it’s something like “Manhattan Below 96th Street, a quarter of Brooklyn, and a slice of Western Queens”. Perhaps 20–25% of the City’s total population lives in one of those neighborhoods.
In Chicago, the story is similar. I consider the “heavily yuppified” portion of Chicago to consist of the downtown area plus Lincoln Park, Lakeview, North Center, West Town, and perhaps Lincoln Square. Those neighborhoods form a contiguous area with around 540k residents, or 20% of Chicago’s overall population. Just like in New York, the yuppie neighborhods exist, and are expanding, but are still a relatively small slice of the overall city.
And in most Rust Belt cities, there are virtually no neighborhoods that fit this criteria outside of the CBD, and perhaps a few CBD-adjacent neighborhoods or a “midtown” area.
Tale of two cities
Another popular descriptor is that lots of major US cities have become highly bifurcated: you’ve got yuppie neighborhoods and very poor neighborhoods, without much in between. This is much more accurate, and has become increasingly true in a lot of major cities. But I still believe it’s an exaggerated narrative.
In Chicago, the archetypal “tale of two cities”, 835k people live in a neighborhod where the median income is greater than 70k, 794k people live in a neighborhood where the median income is less than 40k, and about 1.1 million people live somewhere in between. My stance is that the “two cities” exist, but there are under-discussed shades of gray in between, and I think that’s also true of NYC, LA and the vast majority of the largest cities.
In most states, the wealthiest zip codes are in the suburbs
In Indiana, 8 out of the 10 richest zip codes are in the Indianapolis area, but none are entirely inside the I-465 loop. The wealthiest zip code is in Zionsville, directly northwest of the City, and the 3rd and 4th wealthiest are in Carmel, directly north of the City. Rounding out the top 10 is one zip code on the coast of Lake Michigan, and one on the outskirts of Fort Wayne. The lowest median income out of those 10 zip codes is 134k, while the median income of Indianapolis sits at 48k.
It’s no different in Missouri, where 8 out of the 10 richest zip codes are in suburban St. Louis, and the other two are in suburban Kansas City. This pattern is consistent across the Midwest, outside of Illinois and Minnesota, where a handful of downtown precincts split the top 10 with the north shore and western Hennepin.
On the coasts, cities put up much more of a fight, but still largely lose. Of the 25 wealthiest zip codes in California, only 2 are in San Francisco, and none are in Oakland or San Jose. 10 are in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, 1 is in Marin, 2 are in Orange County, and 7 are in western LA County, in the general vicinity of Beverly Hills and Santa Monica.
New York is the one state where the City wins: 13 of the 25 wealthiest zip codes are in Manhattan, with 5 on Long Island and 7 in Westchester County. The outer boroughs have 0.
The suburbs aren’t underdogs
Now I’ll shift gears from boring, descriptive statistics to some punditry. Why are there otherwise smart people who buy this narrative? I think there’s a couple sides to this: one for urbanites and one for suburbanites.
Twitter urbanites are open to this narrative because a lot of them live in the minority of urban neighborhoods that are quite well-off, so it fits their lived experience. In addition, they’re eager to believe it because they personally enjoy city living, and want to believe that most other Americans agree with their preferences.
But I’ve also seen some posters who are more sympathetic to the suburbs accept this narrative at face value. In this case, I think the motivation is inverted. Let’s say you used to live in a major city, and now you have kids and live in an affluent inner-ring suburb. It’s appealing to believe something along the lines of “I was priced out of the City, where only the wealthy can afford to raise a family”, rather than the more accurate description of “I couldn’t afford a single-family home in one of the 5 most exclusive neighborhoods in the City, so I chose to move to a still-pretty-expensive suburb rather than living in one of the more affordable neighborhoods within City limits, and/or raising a child in a multi-family building”. Not being able to afford 2,000 square feet in Candler Park, Inman Park or Buckhead is not the same thing as not being able to afford to live in Atlanta.
Cities need more wealth, not less
As Covid (hopefully) begins to wane, there will be stories of big companies announcing that they’re shifting towards more remote work long-term, and there will be a variety of different takes about that. One genre will be something like “Actually, this is good, because cities are too expensive, and now we can share the wealth and housing prices can go down”.
I’m here to preemptively tell you that these takes are bad and wrong. U.S. cities overwhelmingly need more wealth and more investment, not less. It’s not a good thing that the wealthiest zip codes in central Indiana are concentrated just outside the City, while its poorest zip codes are concentrated in central Marion County. And it won’t be a good thing if a large chunk of Indianapolis’ white-collar workers cross 96th street into Hamilton and Boone county, shifting tax dollars away from the City, while still putting roughly the same number of miles on the roads as shorter, five-day-a-week commutes become longer, two-to-three-day-a-week commutes. The suburbs aren’t underdogs, and they haven’t been since around 1970.
