Your city's income map in 1960 vs. today

[Docere]

Even Toronto - known as a city where the wealth never left the core - had a core/periphery distinction, but clearly a favored northern section. Most of the low income tracts were in the inner city. Today Toronto has inverted, with a generally affluent core and more working class periphery.

[galleyfox]

Chicago

[Nite]

Originally Posted by Docere

Even Toronto - known as a city where the wealth never left the core - had a core/periphery distinction, but clearly a favored northern section. Most of the low income tracts were in the inner city. Today Toronto has inverted, with a generally affluent core and more working class periphery.

here is another map to illustrate the point. the rich and middle class is currently migrating to the waterfront in Toronto
The entire waterfront might be blue already.

[Steely Dan]

My 4-word review of the Chicago map sequence:

"Fuck you, middle class"


Though not nearly as extremely bifurcated, the Toronto maps are still kinda like:

"Screw you, middle class"

[jmecklenborg]

The United States is exponentially wealthier in 2020 than it was in 1960. The percentage of people earning big money is much, much higher.

[galleyfox]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

My 4-word review of the Chicago map sequence:

"Fuck you, middle class"


Though not nearly as extremely bifurcated, the Toronto maps are still kinda like:

"Screw you, middle class"

I think true middle class is difficult to maintain in older cities.

The original middle class houses in older cities are usually a lot smaller than a modern 2 parent/2children/2 pets/2 car middle-class family would prefer, but they don’t have the same money to afford renovations as upper-class families.

So the housing just becomes low income over time.






Over time, a map like Paris would probably be the true state of a modern city. A wealthy core, surrounded by a patchwork of low, middle and upper income neighborhoods.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by galleyfox

I think true middle class is difficult to maintain in older cities.

The original middle class houses in older cities are usually a lot smaller than a modern 2 parent/2children/2 pets/2 car middle-class family would prefer, but they don’t have the same money to afford renovations as upper-class families.

So the housing just becomes low income over time.

Yeah, maybe it's more a case of the middle class fucking over Chicago than the other way around.

As a fellow middle class person, I want to like more of them, but their tastes are fucking horrible, generally speaking. at least the family ones.



Anyway, a new construction house on the block over from us is hitting the market at $1.8M asking.

Oh shit, here comes the neighborhood.

Not that rich people are necessarily bad, but sometimes it seems impossible to keep an area for regular people stable for regular people over time in urban America these days.


Oh well, norwood park will never change.

So there's that, I guess.

[LosAngelesSportsFan]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

My 4-word review of the Chicago map sequence:

"Fuck you, middle class"


Though not nearly as extremely bifurcated, the Toronto maps are still kinda like:

"Screw you, middle class"

Really striking and apparent when looking at those maps over time. I suspect this is likely true for most medium size and large cities in the US and Canada.

[galleyfox]

Originally Posted by LosAngelesSportsFan

Really striking and apparent when looking at those maps over time. I suspect this is likely true for most medium size and large cities in the US and Canada.

Sort of?

Both the wealthy and the poor will move into middle-class areas very quickly, but the middle-class try to avoid poor areas and weren’t thrilled to live in cities to begin with.

Chicago in 1980 had a very bad hand to start with. It had some middle class neighborhoods in the bungalow belt, but very sparse wealthy areas that directly bordered some of the highest poverty areas.

Whereas the middle class neighborhoods in LA County quickly transitioned to wealthy neighborhoods.

[Steely Dan]

Maybe I've been wrong about all this stuff.

Is it possible that the middle class mostly sucks and that I'm one of its relatively few decent members?

I always thought that regular people were the most special people in the whole world (that's why God makes so many of us), but man they sure as shit don't like urbanism, by and large.

My census tract was solid middle class yellow all the way up until 2017, when it turned light blue.

It will almost certainly be dark blue by 2030.

Feeling trapped between two worlds, neither of which I really belong in.

Where are the goddamn creamy yellows?!?!?!?




No one wants to be regular anymore apparently.

Or if they do, they wanna be regular way the fuck out in bumble.

And fuck that.

[JManc]

That Chicago map is downright depressing.

[Quixote]

"In this world, somehow, an ordinary life has become synonymous with a meaningless life."

— Brené Brown

[jmecklenborg]

People really want 3-4 bedroom houses. There aren't many true three bedroom houses in most U.S. cities (lots of hot attic bedrooms) and four bedroom houses are almost non-existent within city limits, since they didn't start being built en masse until the 1970s.

[Quixote]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

People really want 3-4 bedroom houses. There aren't many true three bedroom houses in most U.S. cities (lots of hot attic bedrooms) and four bedroom houses are almost non-existent within city limits, since they didn't start being built en masse until the 1970s.

This is true, and in the context of urban milieus, 3-4-bedroom townhouses for single families doesn’t yield the best density. A bunch of skyscrapers, which are only allowed over relatively small land masses in all U.S. cities (including New York), with that amount of bedrooms isn’t economical and the square footage for those apartments/condos would be smaller.

[Crawford]

I think three-four bedrooms are fairly common in older Detroit suburbs and Detroit proper? There are a ton of non-bungalow neighborhoods, and most of the intact Detroit proper hoods aren't bungalows (the working class housing disappeared, while the big brick homes mostly remain).

But yeah, it's true that it became much more standard in recent years. And most of the older neighborhoods are either yuppie-expensive or considered ghettoish, so not a consideration for Joe Sixpack.

[Tom In Chicago]

^Again. . . just my perception, but much of that FOODSTAMPLANDIA still feels like creamy yellow working class Chicago. . .

I mean. . . if that were really as bad as it looked on paper, wouldn't those neighborhoods look more bombed out and empty than they actually are?

Please don't shoot me for having an opinion on what I see on the streets vs. what the data says. . . but it feels like a disconnect to some extent. . . I dunno. . .

. . .

[Steely Dan]

^ yeah, I get all that, and you're not wrong, a lot of it is still pretty stable work-a-day working class Chicago.

I'm just bitching about the stark geographic divergence of incomes now compared to the olden days.

I guess I prefer a more dromedary distribution compared to our increasingly bactrian one.

But as I said before, I'm just an old man yelling at clouds. And a lot of this isn't really a "Chicago" issue as much as it a situation stemming from larger macro-level economic trends.

If anything, this thread aptly demonstrates that cities are always in a state of flux, usually for both better and worse, simultaneously.

[eschaton]

Regarding the Chicago map, I need to note that it divided up the income spectrum in a pretty weird way.

Typically, income quintiles are based 20% of households. Therefore, the bottom 20% are the poorest 20%, the middle 20% are the middle 20%, etc.

However, the categories shown here don't track. The "middle class" is defined as being those within 20% of the (national?) average.

The problem with the amount of people within this group won't necessarily be 20%, and likely shrunk over time. Over the last few decades, the top quintile (as defined by normal standards) has really pulled away in terms of income:



Note that although there's a lot of focus on the upper class typically - the 1%, the increase is not limited to this group. Everyone upper-middle class has done well, more recently.

What does this mean? In absolute numbers, there are probably way more people making more than 40% more than the median household nationwide. So as much as the Chicago maps capture a real trend, it's likely overstated a bit, just because there's more top-end wealth in general.

[galleyfox]

Originally Posted by eschaton

Regarding the Chicago map, I need to note that it divided up the income spectrum in a pretty weird way.


However, the categories shown here don't track. The "middle class" is defined as being those within 20% of the (national?) average.
.

It’s weighted relative to the Chicago MSA median income, so it’s measuring the distribution of the poor, wealthy and middle-class within the Chicago metro as it changes over time.

So in 1970 most of the poor and the wealthy lived outside the city. And that switched over the decades.

Yes relative wealth did change, but the Chicago MSA is decently close to the national average so many neighborhoods had a real decline in wealth adjusted for inflation.

1970

1980

1990

2000

2007

2012