NASHVILLE — When Ashley Broadnax thinks of the East Nashville neighborhood where she grew up in the 1990s, the images that flood in have a modest middle-class hue.
After school, they and other neighborhood kids bought snacks from the corner store and threw balls into the street when their parents came home, some in worker uniforms, others from jobs as teachers or office workers. Neighbors chatted on the porches and lawns of modest one-story houses. There were a few poor families and a few rich, but more than a third of her neighbors earned between $40,000 and $75,000 in today’s dollars — enough to live comfortably.
But by 2020, the income distribution had tilted so much that half of families were earning $100,000 or more, census data shows. All around, the humble homes of Mrs Broadnax’s youth have been replaced by high-end terraced houses informally known as ‘tall skinnys’ that tower over the older homes that remain.
So when it was Mrs Broadnax’s turn to pay the rent, on her own middle-income salary as a teacher, the costs were out of reach.
Like many Americans, Nashville residents are increasingly plagued by economic tides that are driving them into neighborhoods much richer or much poorer than the regional norm, according to a New York Times analysis. A smaller proportion of families live in middle-class neighborhoods, places where incomes are typically within 25 percent of the regional median.
In Nashville, the proportion of families living in middle-class neighborhoods fell by 15 percentage points between 1990 and 2020. But the proportion of families in the richer grew by 11 points and the segment living in poor neighborhoods grew by four points.
In some ways, the pattern reflects how rich Americans choose to live near other rich people, and how poorer Americans struggle to make ends meet.
But the pattern also points to a broader trend of income inequality in the economy, as the population of families earning more than $100,000 has grown much faster than other groups, even after adjusting for inflation, and the number of families earning less than $40,000 has grown much faster than other groups, even after adjusting for inflation. , has risen at twice the rate as families in the middle.
Ms Broadnax has become part of a major nationwide hunt for affordable housing. High rents in the city initially sent her to the more affordable neighborhood of Antioch in 2011. But home prices there have nearly doubled since 2018, so buying a home meant moving further afield to a suburb called La Vergne.
“The same people who work in their city can’t afford to live in their city,” Ms. Broadnax said of Nashville.
Nationally, only half of American families living in metropolitan areas can say their neighborhood income is within 25 percent of the regional median. A generation ago, 62 percent of families lived in these middle-income neighborhoods.
“People are being pushed out, and that’s breaking up a historic kind of working-class neighborhoods,” said Marybeth Shinn, a professor at Vanderbilt University who studies homelessness and social exclusion. “You gradually change a neighborhood from a fairly modest kind of neighborhood where many people could live to one where only people with a little more means can live.”
That evolution has mixed consequences for people who see their neighborhood change.
When Jim Polk bought his home in East Nashville in 1979, the community left some amenities to be desired. The park near his house was dilapidated and the neighborhood had few sidewalks or streetlights.
While nearby firefighters, nurses and local government workers were replaced by technical workers, engineers and lawyers, Mr. Polk mourned the loss of their old, familiar neighborhood where his four daughters had learned to accept people from different backgrounds.
“So many families have moved over time,” says Mr. Polk, who spent decades as a community education coordinator for the city’s public schools. “It didn’t remind them of the place they used to live, and it was so expensive to stay.”
But Mr. Polk and his wife were able to keep up with the increase in property taxes on their city pensions, and they couldn’t ignore the improvements to the neighborhood: New sidewalks and streetlights were installed and the long-neglected park was cleaned up. When his church was destroyed by a tornado in 2020, his new neighbors had the resources to help the congregation purchase a new building.
Even more important is the rapid rise in the price of housing in the neighbourhood. mr. Polk bought his house for $36,000. A house across the street sold for more than $1.5 million in February, according to Zillow.
“Improvements have been made in the services available to the people who live in the area,” he said. “But who can participate?”
Experts say the changes in housing patterns represent some form of economic segregation, as Americans are less likely to live in neighborhoods with people from other socioeconomic classes. Economic segregation exacerbates the problems often associated with income inequality. There are what researchers call “neighborhood effects,” with studies showing poor children suffer from better odds from climbing the socio-economic ladder as they grow up outside concentrated poverty.
And wealthy neighborhoods tend to hold a disproportionate share of resources, such as better schools, more parks, and better access to health professionals.
This economic segregation “not only concentrates low-income families in high-poverty neighborhoods, but it concentrates affluent families in affluent neighborhoods, where they can do some sort of opportunity hoarding,” said Sean F. Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford. university. He and another sociologist, Kendra Bischoff of Cornell University, have written multiple paper on economic segregation.
Consider Durham, NC
Since 1990 there has been a wave of wealth and investment in the center of the city. At the same time, the percentage of families living in low-income neighborhoods has doubled.
Turquoise LeJeune Parker, an elementary school technology instructor, said the split reality of rich and poor neighborhoods was not doing her low-income students any good. She described what she saw as the prevailing mindset of people flocking to affluent areas of the city, saying, “We won’t push for funds for our schools, we won’t push for that because ‘I have what I need on my side’.” from the city, so I’m good.’”
To some extent, economic segregation has gone hand in hand with the erosion of the middle class in general.
At the same time, local governments across the country have done little to maintain or expand affordable housing, investing instead in attracting high-paying workers, driving up prices and evicting lower-income residents.
And exclusive zoning often prevents denser, cheaper housing from being built in high-end enclaves—Tennessee even has prevented cities from adopting zoning plans that would protect affordability. Property taxes on many homes have risen, forcing old residents to sell to investors.
But whatever the cause, similar trends can be seen across the country.
In the Boston metropolitan area, middle-class neighborhoods are shifting in both directions. In the 1990s and 2000s, many were economically behind. In the past decade, because of widespread gentrification in the citymany modest neighborhoods have been transformed into much wealthier ones.
A generation ago, Seattle’s tech industry began to flourish, but the area was also a major manufacturing center, with seven out of ten families living in middle-class neighborhoods. Today, only five in ten do. Nearly a third live in wealthy enclaves.
In the Midwest, the proportion of families living in middle-class neighborhoods has fallen 13 percentage points since 1990 in Columbus, Ohio, 12 in Chicago and nine in Indianapolis.
And in Orlando, according to 1990 census data, nearly 70 percent of the area’s residents lived in “average” neighborhoods. In 2020, the same was true for only 46 percent.
That makes many people feel as if they are looking in from the outside.
Michael Street is a union electrician who moved about 25 minutes from Nashville to Goodlettsville. He said he spent his days driving around Nashville, working on homes that have all been redone, rebuilt, or defaced in neighborhoods he can no longer afford.
“You’re poor, or you’re rich,” he said. “The middle class is phasing out. Either you have a lot of money, or you barely make ends meet.”
Methodology
To measure the increasing level of economic segregation in the United States, The New York Times used census data to compare the median household income of each census with the median for the surrounding metropolitan area for the 1990s, 2000s, 2010, and 2020. how many families lived in middle-class areas where the median household income was within 25 percent of the regional median, and how many families lived in areas where the income level was 25 percent or more above or below the regional median. All figures are adjusted for inflation to 2020 values.
Source data and maps were from socialexplorer.com and nhgis.org.