The Persistent Economic Advantage of America’s Suburbs

Authored by Whitney Airgood-Obrycki of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, it looks at the change in the economic status of urban and suburban neighborhoods from 1970 to 2010, a period that overlaps with notions of the resurgence of America’s urban centers and the decline of its suburbs. In contrast to the idea of a Great Inversion—a shift of affluence back to the cities and poverty out to the suburbs—Airgood-Obrycki finds that suburban neighborhoods overwhelmingly outperformed their urban counterparts during the four-decade period spanning 1970 to 2010. More than half of urban neighborhoods in the top two quartiles saw their economic status decline, compared to 40 percent of their suburban peers, and the decline in economic status tended to be much steeper for those urban neighborhoods.

Source: www.citylab.com