White Working Class population by city/metro

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Crawford

I think we're conflating bakers and small business owners.

Bakers (the dudes actually baking the bread, whether in France or U.S.) probably make modest salaries. The small business owners managing the operation may have real wealth. Yeah, some of these guys are baking too, in smaller operations, but their wealth isn't derived from the baking labor.

But an owner of a central Paris bakery probably has significant legacy wealth, especially if the real estate is owned and paid off.

I guess they could also be landlords. This is common in NYC, where the operator of the business at the street level owns the entire building and thus derives a ton of rental income. BUT if those people are just baking croissants then I stand by my "money laundering" comment.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by Docere

College graduates (NHW)

Atlanta 46.1%
Boston 53.3%
Chicago 47.6%
Dallas 43.7%
Denver 53.9%
Detroit 34.7%
Houston 44.3%
Los Angeles 51.7%
Minneapolis 46.1%
New York 53.1%
Philadelphia 44.7%
Phoenix 38.5%
Pittsburgh 36.3%
San Francisco 62.6%
Seattle 45.6%
Washington 63.7%

Whites without degrees make up over 50% of the overall population in Pittsburgh and probably around 15% in DC, the Bay Area and L.A. I think Trump won the Pittsburgh MSA IIRC (though not Allegheny County).

[Steely Dan]

^ are those stats MSA or city proper?

[Docere]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

maybe, but in America "working class" usually implies more of an economic status than an educational one, ie. people on the rung of the economic ladder smooshed between "middle class" and "poor". There are lots of middle class people in America who don't have degrees.

Maybe the term you were looking for was "blue collar"?

Working class isn't an income level, it's about occupation, the work relationship and culture. The percentage with degrees is usually very close to the percentage with professional or managerial occupations. But yes there are small business owners, police and so on who aren't really working class but not PMC either.

When working class is excluded the option is usually "poor, middle and rich" or lower, middle and upper. Almost everybody in America above the poverty line identifies with the middle because middle class is seen as virtuous. If you can't afford a private jet, you're still middle class.

The term middle class is almost meaningless for this reason.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

^ are those stats MSA or city proper?

MSA. I think the city of Chicago is over 60%. Which isn't surprising given that the NHW population in Chicago proper mostly lives downtown or on the generally affluent North Side.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I guess they could also be landlords. This is common in NYC, where the operator of the business at the street level owns the entire building and thus derives a ton of rental income.

It's common everywhere, not just in NYC.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by lio45

It's common everywhere, not just in NYC.

But not everywhere has rents high enough to pay the car note on a Porsche.

[Docere]

College graduates (NHW), city proper:

Atlanta 82.7%
Boston 72.9%
Chicago 66.5%
Dallas 62.1%
Denver 67.9%
Detroit 39.6%
Houston 60.3%
Los Angeles 58.9%
Minneapolis 64.2%
NYC 61.8% (Manhattan 84%)
Philadelphia 48%
Phoenix 39.7%
Pittsburgh 53.6%
San Francisco 78.5%
Seattle 71.6%
Washington DC 92.1%!

[Steely Dan]

^ I would've never expected Chicago city proper to be above Minneapolis and nearly on par with Denver on that score.

[Docere]

And ahead of NYC too. Looks like more non-professional/working class white ethnics remain in NYC than in Chicago proper.

[Steely Dan]

^ yeah, I think white flight among that demo was greater in Chicago compared to NYC.

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

^ I would've never expected Chicago city proper to be above Minneapolis and nearly on par with Denver on that score.

I wonder what that would look like without residency requirements for city workers.

[Crawford]

NYC has a gigantic Orthodox population, which probably brings the NHW % numbers down.

And NYC doesn't have a city employee residency requirement. City employees, even cops and the like, are generally required to have college degrees these days. And no teacher residency requirement, like many big cities.

The Detroit numbers suggest that the hipster/gentrified narrative is probably overblown. Most white Detroiters are probably working class Arabs and Appalachian whites in SW Detroit. The Detroit neighborhoods directly adjacent to Dearborn are very Arab these days, and far SW Detroit still has a sizable Appalachian minority in the majority Hispanic tracts.

[Docere]

It's increasingly hard to find a metro nowadays where the white population is more college-educated in the suburbs than in the city proper. This is probably a pretty recent development.

[Docere]

[double post]

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

Who makes more? Plumbers or professors? The gap is really quite narrow. Meanwhile the professor (I am one) had to spend upwards of a dozen years pursing undergraduate, master's and then PhD degrees (and often, a stint or three doing a post-doc), so those potential income-earning years (the prime of one's life) are financially, very lean. There are fewer and fewer tenure-track positions in Academia (the only positions that pay decent salaries) and many in Academia now work by cobbling together potentially unrenewable contracts, often from multiple institutions. Plus, when you finally graduate, you have a wall of student debt yet you are in your thirties, when it is time to marry, start a family, etc.

Keep in mind if you're talking about the building trades in particular you generally need to buy your own health insurance (in the states) meaning the annual income doesn't sound quite as good as it could be.

It's not so much true for plumbers, but a lot of the trades (like skilled carpenters) have less work in the winter as well. I knew several guys who just lived in Florida during the winter, not to vacation, but just because that's where they could get outside work during the "cold months."

[eschaton]

Regarding Pittsburgh, there's absolutely a large working-class white contingent in sections of the city. This is the only city I've ever been too where there's a selection of what I can only call "white slum" areas. I mean, this is a white neighborhood. So is this. So is this. So is this. These areas do have growing black populations in some cases, and some of them are gentrifying, but they're all at least 50% white still - and got bad when they were 80%-90% white.

In terms of general city geography, working-class whites are on their way out almost everywhere, though they exist in such high numbers they're going to be a major factor in the city for a long time to come. It's hard these days to think of a working-class white neighborhood in the East End of the city at all, because this side of the city has been gentrifying rapidly over the last few decades. There are some pockets in the North Side however (where gentrification has mostly been limited to the historic brick rowhouse neighborhoods close to Downtown). The southern portion of the city (South of the Monongahela) is still overwhelmingly working-class white, with little gentrification/middle class presence outside of South Side Flats and pockets of Mount Washington, and only a handful of black neighborhoods.

[Crawford]

I assume most of the inner city Appalachian enclaves could be characterized as white slum areas.

West Side of Cincy, Southwest Detroit (though mostly Mexican nowadays), South Side of Flint. Probably every Ohio city of some size has an Appalachian legacy enclave.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Crawford

The Detroit numbers suggest that the hipster/gentrified narrative is probably overblown. Most white Detroiters are probably working class Arabs and Appalachian whites in SW Detroit. The Detroit neighborhoods directly adjacent to Dearborn are very Arab these days, and far SW Detroit still has a sizable Appalachian minority in the majority Hispanic tracts.

I think the number is skewed by Middle Easterners identifying as white on census forms. I would think that city of Detroit's "colloquially white" population is much more educated than almost any other major city. If Trump hadn't killed the MENA category on the census forms this would probably be clearer.

[Chef]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

^ I would've never expected Chicago city proper to be above Minneapolis and nearly on par with Denver on that score.

Minneapolis is more of a blue collar city than people think it is. It may have also had less blue collar white flight than some other cities. Most of the white working class lives in mixed neighborhoods.

I think part of what fools people about Minneapolis is that most of its white bohemian types are blue collar whereas in other cities that cultural niche tends to be populated by college graduates.