WP: U.S. Losing Its Middle Class Neighborhoods (There's Your Bush Boom)

[wellst0nev0ter]

INDIANAPOLIS -- Middle-class neighborhoods, long regarded as incubators for the American dream, are losing ground in cities across the country, shrinking at more than twice the rate of the middle class itself.

In their place, poor and rich neighborhoods are both on the rise, as cities and suburbs have become increasingly segregated by income, according to a Brookings Institution study released Thursday. It found that as a share of all urban and suburban neighborhoods, middle-income neighborhoods in the nation's 100 largest metro areas have declined from 58 percent in 1970 to 41 percent in 2000.

Widening income inequality in the United States has been well documented in recent years, but the Brookings analysis of census data uncovered a much more accelerated decline in communities that house the middle class. It far outpaced the decline of seven percentage points between 1970 and 2000 in the proportion of middle-income families living in and around cities.

Middle-income neighborhoods -- where families earn 80 to 120 percent of the local median income -- have plunged by more than 20 percent as a share of all neighborhoods in Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. They are down 10 percent in the Washington area.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/21/AR2006062101735.html

Lucky duckies all :sarcasm:

[rodeodance]

1. 1970 and 2000 --thisis about the time neoliberalism was taking root.

[tanyev]

2. You can't have an ownership society until you get rid of the middle class.

[Sapere aude]

3. Recently I went to Stockton, CA. There is a river that runs through the

city. On one side of the river there are large Mc Mansion housing developments, new condo developments and and lots of shopping malls being built. On the other side it looks like the old city has never been touched in half a century. All the streets and buildings are decaying and no money seems to be spent there. The people are poor yet all the effort is being put into developing the new part of town. It is quite a contrast. There seems to be nothing in between, just decay on one side and new development on the other.

[union_maid]

4. That might be better than what's happening in NYC

Every inch is going to end up redeveloped in New York. Mahattan has been rich and poor and little middle for a long time. Now it's heading for just rich, with the other boroughs following it and the surrounding suburban areas also going so far upscale that it's hard to say where anyone who doesn't have an awful lot of money is going to go. It's also hard to say where any middle class employees, such as any area requires to function, are going to live.

[The Anti-Neo Con]

5. Slums & McMansions

That's all that is going to exist someday it seems.

[lovuian]

6. What Middleclass there is None!!!

:argh:

[Doremus]

7. By 2020 a majority of the world's population is going to live in slums.

So this is just the beginning.

[Indy_Dem_Defender]

8. Story is on the money

I live inside the marion County line which is the city limits of Indianapolis. Just on the side in the border counties there are massive amounts of new crappy home subdivisions being built, the mortgage companies will just about approve anyone for a home loan. I've stayed in marion county because I don't want to live a cheap shack that if I tapped with my car bumper and it would fall over, I don't want live in a subdivision where I have a asshole neighborhood committee is dictating what I can do in my yard, and I don't like driving getting in massive traffic jams trying to get around. So I stay in marion county, Indianapolis, in which once nice neighborhoods are turned into the slums from slumlords. Like a neighbor of mine who has lived in the neighborhood since it was built says "Rentals give it 6-9 months and a new bunch of trahs with the pitbulls will running loose in the neighborhood."

[earth mom]

9. It's a class war.

Which the corporate media whores are NOT covering in their oh so glowing reports on the economy. Oh hell no! If they did they might find they have a revolution on their hands. :grr: