Middle-class neighborhoods are disappearing from the nation's cities, leaving only high- and low-income districts, new study says

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Ron Miguel, a retired florist and native San Franciscan, can remember when a middle-class family could buy a home in the city without breaking the bank. But over the decades, he has watched that change.

"When we moved into Potrero Hill 30 years ago, this was an affordable area ... but today I couldn't afford the homes and condos going up a block from me," said Miguel, 75. "You have a situation where the cost of housing is astronomical. It's very difficult for the middle income to survive."

The gentrification of San Francisco's neighborhoods reflects one facet of a national trend: the decline of middle-income neighborhoods in metropolitan America, according to a report released today by the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C.

In other American cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia, what were once middle-class neighborhoods gave way to poverty as middle-income residents departed for the suburbs and beyond, said Alan Berube, a Brookings fellow who oversaw the study. But in San Francisco and across the Bay Area, middle-class neighborhoods are disappearing as the skyrocketing cost of housing forces middle-income families to flee in search of affordability.

The middle class has left many of these old central cities for a better lifestyle somewhere else.