News Articles, 1998
  News Articles, Main Page

By Richard Morin

Sunday, January 18, 1998; Page W14

It was the great story of the American Century: the fusing, after World War II, of the broadest and most prosperous middle class the world had ever seen. In its ticky-tack ramblers and backyard barbecues and unbridled sense of confidence lay a historic reversal -- the steady closing of physical and economic gaps between America's rich and poor.

The postwar American middle class was capitalism's answer to socialism. As much as any nuclear-tipped missiles, its egalitarian ideals of comfort and social mobility -- transmitted by movies and television around the world -- helped win the Cold War. Richer and poorer Americans were moving so much closer together throughout the 1950s and 1960s that "observers at the time thought class segregation was on the wane," says demographer Douglas Massey of the University of Pennsylvania.

And now, just as inexorably, without much comment or even much acknowledgment, the country is segregating itself again along economic lines -- both in terms of income and geographically -- as the American Century ends.

If satellites overhead could use their time-lapse photography to map economic and racial segregation in the United States, they would have recorded during recent years two trends: a sharp rise in economic segregation and a slow decline in racial segregation. The maps would show that racial segregation remains far more pervasive than economic segregation -- but that the more striking trend is toward an American landscape in which the rich and poor are increasingly isolated physically from one another.

The main reasons are the travails of American cities and the technological changes that have made "rim cities" in the outer suburbs more viable. In the Washington region and across the country, middle-class and affluent Americans of all races are taking their money and running from urban cores to settle in newly minted suburban neighborhoods where everybody makes about as much money as everybody else. And as they do so, according to economists, demographers and social scientists, they leave behind cities that are increasingly balkanized along class lines, with the wealthy clustered ever more tightly in enclaves of affluence.

"We have entered a new age of inequality in which class lines will grow more rigid as they are amplified and reinforced by a powerful process of geographic concentration," says Massey.

The roots of this change lie in the 1970s, when the long postwar economic expansion came to a screeching halt. While average family incomes began to stagnate, income inequality began to rise. New freeways, followed by new housing and commercial developments, pushed the leading edge of the suburbs farther and farther out from center cities. People with the money to make the move fueled the exodus. As a result, economic segregation began to rise.

By the standards of demography, the resegregation of America along economic lines is occurring at dizzying speed. Paul Jargowsky, a visiting professor of economics at Harvard, estimates that class segregation increased by about 26 percent from 1970 to 1990 -- "a rapid and significant shift, however you measure it."

One result is the concentration of America's poor in high-poverty city neighborhoods. From 1970 to 1990, the proportion of the country's poor that lived in cities increased from 34 percent to 43 percent. In 1970, barely half of the urban poor lived in poor neighborhoods -- defined as neighborhoods where at least 20 percent of all residents live in households below the poverty line. By 1990, two out of three lived in these impoverished neighborhoods.

Affluence is also becoming rapidly concentrated. In 1970, the typical affluent American lived in a neighborhood where 39 percent of the residents were affluent. By 1990, the proportion had increased to 52 percent, Massey says.

These same patterns are reshaping neighborhoods throughout the Washington region. "If anything, economic segregation may be more intense here," says local demographer George Grier. "We are one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. There's also a lot of development, particularly in the suburbs."

This development, Grier argues, is of the type that has tended to concentrate the upper middle class and rich in select neighborhoods. "First off, these homes have high prices. Some developments are surrounded by walls and are gated; you can't even visit without permission. Plus, we have a very mobile population: About half of all residents have moved since 1990," and many are moving away from the District and its inner suburbs.

But haven't the rich, middle class and poor always lived more or less apart? That's true to some extent, specialists say. But during the 1950s and 1960s, economic segregation declined. That's because the income gap between rich and poor narrowed while people stayed put in cities and their inner suburbs. Urban areas that had seen wide chasms between rich and poor decades earlier gradually became more egalitarian.

Even the first wave of suburban migration during this period didn't undermine the trend, specialists say. The full impact of the interstate and suburban highway building boom had yet to be felt. Upwardly mobile homeowners might move across town to a bigger house, but they weren't moving yet in large numbers to the geographically isolated outer reaches. That began more emphatically during the 1970s -- just as the income gap between rich and poor began to widen again.

American politics -- especially local politics -- has felt the consequences. Up through the first half of this century, Jargowsky says, generous portions of all classes lived in the same political jurisdictions -- if sometimes on opposite sides of the tracks. They voted in the same elections, drove on the same streets, sent their children to schools operated by the same school district. That gave the rich and middle class exposure to -- and a stake in -- the fortunes of the poor. And the poor benefited from the services demanded by the middle class and rich, paid for with the latter's taxes.

That's increasingly not true. The rich and poor are no longer just on different sides of the tracks, they're in entirely different political jurisdictions, Massey says. That's bad news for the poor in the city, but it tends to benefit the rich and upper middle classes in the outer suburbs. They enjoy high real estate values, so they can tax themselves at relatively low rates that nonetheless yield ample government services. As a result, these areas become even more attractive to those who can afford the price of admission. Howard County, anyone?

In contrast, "the concentration of poverty in central cities and some inner suburbs generates a high demand for services but yields low property values," Massey says. "High tax rates are required to support generally inferior services" and provide even more incentive for middle-class and wealthier families to leave. Sound like a big capital city anywhere nearby?

More and more, "suburban residents see their fate decoupled from the city," he says. "The middle class are voting with their feet and with their ballots by not supporting [tax-revenue] transfers into cities. The affluent in cities are voting with their pocketbooks, buying private services that replace the inferior services provided by the city."

Jargowsky fears this concentration of poverty will make it even harder for the poor to break into the middle class. "When I was growing up, my family was working- class," he says. "Back then, this was a kind of country where I could rise up from that and go to Princeton and Harvard. I wonder if that's going to be true in the future."

Richard Morin is the director of polling for The Post.

Concentrations of Poverty

In 1970, just over half of all the poor in inner cities lived in poor neighborhoods. In 1990, that number had risen to more than two-thirds. A “poor neighborhood” is a census tract where at least 20 percent of the residents have household income below the poverty line -- about $13,400 for a family of four in 1990.

1970 55%

1990 69%

Concentrations of Wealth

In 1970, the typical affluent American lived in a neighborhood where just under 40 percent of the residents were affluent. In 1990, that figure had climbed to more than 50 percent. The affluent are defined as persons with household income at least four times greater than the poverty level -- $53,000-plus for a family of four in 1990.

1970 39%

1990 52%