Oxstones Investment Club™U.S. unemployment is near a 50-year low, economic growth is brisk and the stock market—despite a disappointing 2018—has paid generous returns since the financial crisis of a decade ago.
But not for everyone. The chasm between rich and poor hasn’t been this wide since data collection began in the 1960s. Workers experience starkly different versions of America depending on which city or neighborhood they live in. One way to measure the economic fortunes of a place is by the concentration of households earning $200,000 or more, the highest threshold in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
© Bloomberg Share of Households Earning $200,000 or More
Nationally, 6.9 percent of American households bring in that much. What follows are the areas (known to the Census Bureau as tracts) that have shown the biggest increases in concentration of $200,000-and-up households since 2000, according to calculations by consulting firm Webster Pacific. It used data released on Dec. 6 and adjusted for inflation. (The ranking excludes recently created tracts, those defined as tracts of significant change and any tract with fewer than 100 households in either 2000 or 2017.)
© Bloomberg 100 Neighborhoods with the Most Growth in High Earners
Cook County, Illinois
Cook County, which includes the county seat of Chicago, is home to the No. 1 and No. 7 fastest-growing concentrations of $200,000-plus households. No. 1 is, ironically, the area around where the Cabrini-Green public housing projects once stood. Cabrini-Green was notorious for violent crime, poverty and de facto racial segregation until its demolition beginning in the 1990s at the behest of the Chicago Housing Authority.
Even back then, authorities fretted that redevelopment plans might displace low-income families. They were right to be worried. Two decades later, the area’s concentration of $200,000-plus households has skyrocketed from zero to 39 percent. For some of the longtime residents who remain, the neighborhood’s transformation has been isolating.
Latanya Palmer, 53, grew up in the Cabrini Rowhouses. While she moved into a nearby mixed-income development in 2005, the hypergentrification has occasionally made her feel like a stranger in her own home. That sentiment echoes across the country, as poor and working-class Americans are increasingly pushed aside by frenzied development and prohibitive living expenses.
“It looks beautiful,” Palmer said of the neighborhood now, though she recalled how property managers early on would berate former Cabrini-Green residents for sitting on their own stoops. “They made us feel like we were less than human.”
Palmer recently got a job as a home health aide and hopes to move out of her subsidized unit. Still, she laments what’s been lost. “As poor as we were growing up, I didn’t realize we were poor—because it felt like a community,” she said. “Now it doesn’t feel like a community.”
The census tract in question includes the still-standing, albeit largely vacant row houses where Palmer grew up. But now there are luxury condominiums and apartments, too. They sport rooftop terraces and sparkling views of the city’s affluent Gold Coast and Lake Michigan beyond. A three-bedroom penthouse can cost around $2 million.
About 20 miles to the north, Cook County has another top 10 neighborhood: the Glen, in the suburb of Glenview. Converted from what used to be Naval Air Station Glenview, the planned community has hundreds of families living in condos, town houses and single-family homes that go for as much as $2.5 million each, according to realtor Margaret Ludemann.
Tags: $200K, American households, Cook County, economic growth, financial crisis, high earners, Illinois, U.S. unemployment