Large Cities and the End of the Middle Class

Joel Kotkin reports:

America’s largest cities are increasingly divided into three
classes: the affluent, the poor, and the nomadic class of young people
who generally come to the city for a relatively brief period and then leave. New York, the aspirational city of my grandparents, now has the smallest share of middle-income families in the nation, according to a recent Brookings Institution study, with Los Angeles and San Francisco not far behind. In 1980 Manhattan, New York’s wealthiest borough, ranked 17th among U.S. counties for social inequality; by 2007 Bloomberg’s “luxury city” was first, with the top fifth earning 52 times the income of the lowest fifth, a disparity roughly comparable to that of Namibia.

When Barack Obama and his loyal big city followers claim they are for the middle class: you have to laugh.