America’s Cities Are Staggeringly Unequal
The rising tide of economic revival in many of the nation’s largest urban centers has definitively not lifted all boats. And that may help explain why so many cities have faced waves of protest this year.
In every major American metropolitan area, including many of those that have prospered most since the 2008 financial crash, huge gaps still separate white people and people of color—not only in terms of average hourly wages, but in terms of educational attainment too.
“No place is actually doing well. Even the best performers … have racial inequities that are unconscionable,” says Sarah Treuhaft, the vice president of research at PolicyLink, an Oakland-based research-and-advocacy group. “Economic growth is not enough. Many prosperous places are not doing well on sharing that prosperity.”
These sobering findings are contained in of the National Equity Atlas, a massive online compendium of census and other federal data about cities and
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