There’s an interesting article on economic segregation at City Journal. Here’s the conclusion:
A decade or so ago, Bill Bishop noted how talented and educated people were concentrating more in some places than others, a tendency he dubbed “the big sort.†The big sort has now become an even bigger sort. America’s cities and metropolitan areas have cleaved into clusters of wealth, college education and highly-paid knowledge-based occupations that are strikingly different from its concentrations of poverty, low levels of education, and poorly-paid service occupations.
Where cities and neighborhoods once mixed different kinds of people together, they are now becoming more homogeneous and segregated by income, education, and occupation. In separating metro-dwelling Americans across these three key dimensions of socio-economic class, this bigger sort threatens to undermine the essential role that cities have played as incubators of innovation, creativity, and economic progress.
It is not just that the economic divide in America has grown wider; it’s that the rich and poor effectively occupy different worlds, even when they live in the same cities and metros.
Thank you, Interstate Highway System.
I don’t know if you mean highway system literally, but I’m more impressed that it’s schools and crime, ….and schools.
Here in Chicagoland you have Bellwood right next to River Forest. Night and day. Chicago west side vs Oak Park. Bolingbrook vs Hinsdale or Naperville. Warrenville vs Wheaton. Gold Coast vs Hyde Park. Chicago Heights vs Munster, IN. I don’t know what adjoins Saugunash, but all near located, in and out of the city, not highway dependent. I’ve always been amazed at how different areas can be yet so geographically proximate. I see similar trends when I travel.
I don’t think it’s the interstate highway system, but the intrastate system and, even more, the intra metropolitan area system. It’s also zoning, homeowners associations, etc.
For the last couple of decades most of the money spent on what was theoretically supposed to be a replacement and upgrade of the old federal highway system has been used to improve connections within major urban areas. That has facilitated the sorting process in an ever-expanding sprawl. In most major metropolitan areas the intrastate and metropolitan area systems are the interstate system.
Here in Chicago is a good example. We have four interstates here: 55, 88, 90, and 94. They account for a minority of our major expressways. Those are the feeder routes: 255, 290, 294, 355. Projects that depend strictly on state, county, or city funding have been stalled for decades (in some cases for 80 years).