I always think there's something a bit misleading about city-by-city inequality studies. New York and LA are both constructed in ways that make them pretty incongruous with other cities, and even moreso with each other.

In New York, Manhattan's inequality rate is probably worse than everywhere else in the country. The rest of the boroughs bring the city closer to balance, but they sort of don't feel like the same place. Outlying Brooklyn and Queens are such radically different places than Manhattan that lumping them together seems like a mostly useless thing to do. This is to say nothing of Staten Island. It may work from a political angle, but not from a sociological one.

Conversely, LA's outlying suburbs stretch on for miles and miles and miles looking pretty much the same as much of the city proper; there's a reason that the LA area is more dense than the New York area. But LA and its suburbs wouldn't be lumped together like Manhattan and the other boroughs, even though they're more readily recognizable as the "same" place. The only difference is a set of map lines that aren't visible to residents.

That said, DC inequality is really bad, which is obvious to any of us who've lived there. But the country's two biggest cities are such outliers that it's hard to know what comparisons to draw.

Dana,

Excellent post. What interested me about your post was your use of a photograph (with caption) to support your story. In this publishing environment where the traditional media almost never focusses on what is really going on in our communities (in words, let alone images), it's nice to see a photograph that does.

Progressives should be doing more of this, sharing our point of view, literally. We see things differently.

Marshall

That picture is shocking. It's constantly going on around us in the city, but we're rarely aware of it unless we open our eyes to our surroundings.

Yes, that's definitely a very special photo and this is a very special post.

However, the irony is that this site can't recognize that their support for massive immigration leads directly to the inequality they decry.

DC is an absurd hellhole full of shocking juxtapositions--fatcats feeding at the govmunt trough cheek-by-jowl with the vast unemployed (unemployable?) underclass, a concentration of thinktanks and experts of all varieties in a town with some of the worst public schools in the country, barren monumental edifices just a stone's throw from both yupscale condos and crumbling inner-city slums, do-gooders galore and legions of people who are still unhelped, the center of American democracy that is itself deprived of voting rights, etc etc. Utterly absurd.

Inequality is high in DC because the middle class- ie black working people with childen - has moved to Prince George's County. The reason they've moved is that the DC schools are truly dreadful, much worse than you can imagine - not because of lack of funding, which is high, but because of inept and currupt management. The new mayor is the first since home rule to take on the schools bureaucracy and he may actually be successful. If he is, the black middle class will return. If not, the city will remain divided between people who are too poor to leave and wealthy people who can send their kids to private schools or who don't have kids at all.

PS- anyone who thinks the sign is "shocking" knows nothing about city life. Rich and poor live cheek by jowl in cities. What is shocking about that? Is it better for the rich to live in gated communities on the golf course? In any event, in real estate speech, a 'luxury condo' means a one-bedroom that has air conditioning, an elevator, and no rats. And the construction of new high-rise - that is, dense -housing in Columbia Heights is a good thing for the city and for the neighborhood. Until very recently this was an area of drug dealers and drunks on the corner. The opening of the metro stop has brought new construction, new commerce, and new jobs.

LA's a little weird because a lot of the richest (Malibu, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills) and poorest (Compton, Inglewood, East Los Angeles) areas are technically outside town lines, in independent cities or unincorporated land. Add them back in and I'd expect to see their ranking go up bit.