The Growing Urban Inequality Gap, Visualized

Emily Badger and Kevin Quealy report on how inequality is changing in the urban areas of the United States.

Economic inequality has been rising everywhere in the United States. But it has been rising much more in the booming places that promise hefty incomes to engineers, lawyers and innovators. And those places today are also the largest metros in the country: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Houston, Washington.

The news about growing inequality in the nation's largest metros is supplemented with a graphic populated with uses data from a recent analysis by Jaison Abel and Richard Deitz [pdf] of the New York Fed. The examples of New York City and Binghamton, New York, provide illustration of the larger narrative about worsening inequality in large metros.