Segregation By Income Is Growing In U.S.

While the United States is making some tentative progress in solving racial and ethnic segregation, there is now another type of segregation that is growing significantly worse -- income segregation. There have always been poor areas and rich areas of every city, but in the last 30 years this type of segregation has been growing, with more high-income people living among their high-income peers and more low-income people living in areas populated mainly by their low-income peers. This also means that the areas where people with a wide-variety of income levels live together are shrinking.

This is a problem because the last thing needed in this country is more segregation -- of any kind. But according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center, that is exactly what is happening. They have developed an index to guage the growth of income segregation, and they call it the Residential Income Segregation Index. Here is how it is figured:

That means a higher number means more income segregation, and in most American metropolitan areas the number has grown significantly since 1980. This is a sad development, because the more we separate ourselves, the easier it is to institutionalize that separation and the harder it will be to insure equal rights and opportunities for all citizens.

Here are the 16 metropolitan areas with the largest income segregation. The first number is the RISI for 2010, and the number in parentheses in the RISI for 1980. Note that the three cities with the highest RISI scores are all in Texas, where the Republicans say they are creating an "economic miracle". But this shouldn't be any surprise to anyone. While Texas has a good number of high income people and a disappearing middle class, it also leads the nation in both the percentage and number of workers getting paid minimum wage or lower.

1. San Antonio...............63 (39)
2. Houston...............61 (32)
3. Dallas-Ft. Worth...............60 (39)
4. New York...............57 (49)
5. Denver...............55 (34)
6. Detroit...............54 (43)
7. Columbus...............53 (37)
8. Los Angeles...............51 (47)
9. Philadelphia...............51 (39)
10. Miami...............49 (30)
11. Baltimore...............48 (36)
12. Phoenix...............48 (33)
13. Kansas City...............47 (38)
14. Cincinnati...............47 (31)
15. Washington...............47 (43)
16. Cleveland...............46 (34)

National average...............46 (32)