The Rise of Economic Segregation

s Americans are growing farther apart on the income scale, we are also effectively moving apart from each other within cities, into our own economic enclaves. So why is that? The answer, Taylor says, may lie more in human behavior than economic data.

"We know over the whole entirety of human history that people have a tremendous tendency to cluster among themselves, whether in tribes, whether in nations," Taylor says. "Like attracts like. That’s not always the case for some people who value diversity. But it’s sort of hardwired into human nature."

(To pause for a note on data: Pew is defining "upper-income" households as those earning more than $104,400 a year, or double the national median income. "Low-income" households are those earning less than $34,000, or two-thirds the national median. Pew also adjusted these thresholds for local cost of living).

The most economically segregated large cities in America are all in Texas: San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas top the list.

Pew isn’t in the business of coming right out and telling us that we should wring our hands over all this growing economic segregation (and for what it’s worth, America is still more segregated by race than by income, even as those trends move in opposite directions). But it’s hard to interpret this as anything other than bad news.

"I do think it’s appropriate to observe that since the very beginning of our country, our quasi-official motto has been E pluribus unum – out of many, one," Taylor says. "One could make the argument that if increasingly we live among our own kind, whether we measure that by race or ethnicity, by income, by ideology or by partisanship, that may call into question the strength of the unum. We’re doing great on the pluribus.”

-Atlantic Cities