This Is the Thing That Will Destroy Our Cities

cities are engines of innovation they're massive disproportionate contributors to our nation's wealth their cultural hot beds and they places where people from all walks of life can just be themselves everyone should be in favor of making our cities better even people who don't live in one but cities aren't without problems and so many of those problems can be traced to one thing income inequality so today I'm going to introduce a metric that I haven't used before explain how it works and I'm going to talk about the city with the most and the least inequality all about the genie coefficient coming up next this is City nerd weekly content on cities and transportation and today you'll have to squint a little to see the Nexus with Transportation but as always all this stuff really is connected because income inequality does manifest in things like social discontent and political polarization really the erosion of democracy itself but also in nuts and bolts urbanism related things like housing affordability the crushing expense of car dependency and the disparity in urban amenities between affluent and less affluent neighborhoods or something like policing if you set up a system that's designed to accumulate wealth to people who already have it then you'd better plan on paying more for police to keep the rabble in line and keep in mind income inequality is a policy decision it's a statement of a society's values the idea that people who are born rich or or got lucky or won the big brain sweep Stakes or lost the debilitating addiction sweep Stakes that those things which are arbitrarily doled out to determine whether you deserve to live a life of dignity let alone a life of opulence well it's by no means an obvious idea and the acceptance of that idea varies widely by nation and by City to an extent as we'll find out later in the video this is another one where the methodology and Analysis are very interesting in themselves so so I'm going to spend a little more time on that than usual so let's talk about the genie coefficient which is a way to measure different types of inequality and today we're focused on income inequality the simple blackbox version is that zero means no inequality and one means complete inequality so in terms of income a genie coefficient of zero or 0% means everyone makes the exact same income while a genie coefficient of one or 100% describes a situation where a single individual has all the income and everyone else has nothing so a lower Genie coefficient means less income inequality here's a visualization of income inequality across the globe and you can see that even though it's a scale of 0 to 100 most countries are in the 30 to 50 range so it's important to understand that small differences in the coefficient are a big deal I don't want to just give you a black box though I want to kind of show you what the number actually represents it's mathematical obviously but the best way way to explain it is visually take all the households in a geographic area and to simplify I'm going to group them into 10 desiles so an equal number of households in each with the lowest income desile on the left and the highest one on the right and for each desile you want to know what proportion of the geographic areas aggregate income they earn then what you want to do is set this up as a cumulative so that moving left to right each column includes its own share of the income plus the income shares of all the Iles to the left so that when you get to the last desile You Are by definition at 100% since you've totaled up all 10 desiles this is simplified just to explain it you don't have to use desiles at all you could literally plot every individual household from lowest to highest if you want to be super precise but the idea is there's Now sort of a curve from the lowest to the highest which we call the Loren's curve and the shape of that curve really represents the level of inequality the genie coefficient basically draws a straight line from the origin to the 100% point which we call the line of equality and then compares the area between that line and the Loren's curve to the overall area under the line this is really all done mathematically but now you can see what it looks like when the genie coefficient is say 0.5 or 50% so when you have a society where everyone makes the exact same income and you arrange all those desiles cumulatively there is by definition no space between the Loren curve and the line of equality so the genie coefficient is zero and conversely if all the income is in the top desile and the other 90% of nothing there basically is no Len curve and the area in between is 1.0 or 100% note here I think in general a lower Genie coefficient is good but I'm not personally advocating for a genie coefficient of zero I mean that would be a society where an engineering Apprentice straight out of college makes the same salary as as like a supervising engineer with a 20-year track record of doing amazing work who's been elevated into a high responsibility high stress position and I just suspect that's not going to end up being a functional Society just a personal observation okay couple more notes on methodology the US census's American Community survey collects data on household incomes and the good news is they do the genie calculation for you so that's sorted the other thing is I chose to do this by Metropol statistical area because this is one where the kind of arbitrariness with which city limits are drawn would skew the analysis in ways that I don't think are helpful so I'm limiting this to Metro areas over a million and by the way out of the 330 million people who live in the US well over half do live in Metro areas over a million honestly we should just be running stuff but unfortunately our votes are systematically devalued sorry folks it's an election year and I'm just going to be annoying so this is going to be a countdown of the Metro areas with the highest Genie numbers so the most inequality and it ends up being an interesting list you get Metro areas with a disproportionate amount of poverty and lowincome workers you get kind of the opposite and you really get Metro areas where both of these things live side by side in large quantities and there will be honorables and dishonorables too so let's get into it 10th most inequality Cleveland Ohio so for each of these I'll give you the the genie index which is what the Census Bureau calls the number they calculate but I'll also give you the median household income and the mean income and Google the definitions of median and mean if you need to but the difference between them is maybe an even more intuitive way of understanding inequality and you might say well it's Cleveland Housing is cheap there so is income inequality really that big a deal well remember when I did my video on location efficiency where I looked at the cost burden of housing plus transportation for the median household the situation in Cleveland was pretty dire and that's why talking about this is important ninth shouldn't be a shocker San Jose California lots of people with high income jobs of course but every city depends on people who don't make nearly that much daycare providers bus drivers service workers it's an endless list so all these Metro areas are going to have Genie numbers either very close to or over 0.5 and I don't necessarily want to make an Apples to Apples comparison between how the census calculates this number and what's in this map I grabbed from Wikipedia But I just point out that the only Nations that have a genie number over 0.5 are like Colombia and a bunch of subsaharan African countries so just ponder that for a minute number eight is Tampa St Pete so I went to St Pete a couple weeks ago and I had a great time making a city visit video but I have to admit St p is the more affluent of the two cities and I probably spent most of my time in the nicer parts of St Pete but there's no doubt that the region has a stark divide between the halves and the hav knots and I do hope to get back to Tampa Bay in the not too distant future to show more aspects of the region I'll probably still hit up the dog bars though number seven rarely discussed on this channel and even then usually not for good reasons Birmingham Alabama this is lazy but I can imagine there's a lot of poverty across the region and downtown Birmingham is not inspiring and I was not aware of where rich people live here but I have it on good authority that the Alabama city with the highest median household income is the suburb of mountain brick actually very close into the Central City and if we do a flyover it kind of looks like what you think it's going to look like number six radically underd discussed on this channel if you ask me New Orleans if you were tuned in when Hurricane Katrina happened or probably even if you weren't it's not going to be a surprise that New Orleans is on this list because of how radically different the impact of that disaster was on poor communities versus more affluent ones and yes there are definitely rich neighborhoods in the city and metro area when you have a city that's this singular architecturally gastronomically culturally and historically and you have neighborhoods that look like this wealthy people are going to set up shop number five the greater Boston area seems intuitive of course the region has poor neighborhoods and all that sits side by side with lots of high paying Tech and like pharmaceutical Industries and probably more higher education jobs than any other us Metro incidentally if I look at Metro areas under a million a lot of the ones with the highest Genie numbers are college towns like Ann Arbor champagne orbana and Gainesville number four maybe the region I expected to top this list San Francisco and it is interesting that it has more inequality than San Jose the metro area that I think has the Lion Share of the high-paying tech jobs but I think I buy it also is it any surprise that so many of our most walkable and quote unquote livable cities also have the most inequality I mean I think it's kind of a chicken and egg thing does the Bay Area attract a disproportionate number of high earners because the region is an engine of innovation and high value knowledge work with relatively good Urban amenities or do all those amenities exist because the high value Industries create a tax base whose revenues get funneled into improvements in places where High income people demand them I don't know the answer and it's probably Dynamic but I think it's a question that really goes to the heart of things I talk about on this channel number three Los Angeles not as affluent as the Bay Area overall and I just want to share how household incomes break out between the three California Metro areas we've talked about out the Census Bureau has these standard bins they use for categorizing household income and you can see that kind of an overwhelming majority of LA metro area households are in these top five bins compared to say the nation as a whole but look at the San Frisco and San Jose Metro areas there are just an absolutely shocking number of households that are in that 200k and over bin but there are a lot more households in La that are making less than $50,000 a year which I think it would be very hard to live on there and that's why La shows up so high on this list okay in a minute I'm going to get to the last two which I think you can probably guess we'll see I'm going to give you a couple dishonorables too and I'm going to give you the five most Equitable cities in the US when it comes to income distribution which is also super interesting but first a brief reminder to cck on all the usual stuff to spread this Channel's Madness to people who haven't yet had the experience of having the scales fall from their eyes and maybe that's a bit Messianic anyway follow on all theual apps and send all your tithes to the patreon if you want to stay in the good grazes of this channel yeah okay that was terrible so look I just want to be clear that income inequality and really inequality of all kinds is an issue that I don't believe can be separated from urbanism it's very hard to have a great City probably impossible if the only people who could realize all the benefits of the city are people who make like the 75th percentile income or higher I mean something like that is really just a recipe for a social breakdown of all kinds and it's hard to enjoy $8 pourover coffee and $100 spin classes when you have to fight through Mass demonstrations in the streets to get to them that's a little dark but I think it's reality anyway let me give you the five us Metro areas over a million that have the lowest Genie scores and five is DC which is completely shocking to me and I can't even come up with a good theory on why why this is is there a better social safety net in our nation's capital because it's the place where demonstrations in the streets would be the most damning to our country I don't know what the mechanism for that would be but anyway give me your theories for why DC shows up on this end of the spectrum four Raleigh North Carolina which I don't have a theory about three Grand Rapids Michigan same two the Inland Empire which I feel obliged to say that there's only less inequality in the sense that everyone is equally miserable and number one really interesting Salt Lake remember this is a metro area that punches way above its weight in transit and intersection designs that make you want to rinse your eyes out with hydrochloric acid but there are sociopolitical structures in this region that don't really exist anywhere else in the US that seem to do a very above average job of looking out for the common good and I swear I'm going to do a video about all of this at some point oh and if I remove the threshold of 1 million people the very least inequitable city is Fairbanks Alaska and I'm going to be a conscientious urbanist YouTuber and give all you Fairbanks viewers the number to call if you want to report a pothole took me literally 3 seconds to Google but it'd be presumptuous of me to think people who watch urbanist YouTube could actually figure that out on their own no I'm not bitter dishonorables I didn't want to dunk on Puerto Rico because some of this is a function of just how much poverty there is in a metro area but if I included it San Juan actually tops this list and if I include all Metro areas regardless of size it's mayz we should really talk about Puerto Rico more and why there are conditions like this in any Metro area in any part of US territory I've been there the west coast of Puerto Rico is gorgeous and the people are great but that Genie number is shameful and my dishonorable for Metro areas under a million not in Puerto Rico is Bridgeport Stamford Connecticut so you could probably see where this list is going number two the capital of walkable urbanism for the rich car dependency for the masses or maybe it isn't because there's one more metro area on this list Miami Florida and I want to be clear that you can drill down into this data and look at individual cities I just don't know how much it tells you because of the way people sort themselves in Metro areas but the city of Miami is even more extreme than the metro area as a whole with a genie number over 0.55 and Miami Beach it's a cool place to visit but my goodness Genie number over6 and look at the spread between the mean income and the median income just wild stuff Miami isn't number one though that exalted spot is reserved for the metro area and City that's supposed to be a symbol of Hope for the entire planet the place where you can truly chase your dreams on the other hand it is also the place where if you can make make it there then by definition you can make it anywhere and I think a high Genie number is consistent with that idea it is really disappointing because when I think of New York I think of like Ells Island and the literal Statue of Liberty a Beacon of Hope raising the torch showing the way give me your tired you're poor your huddled masses type stuff but it's fair to say that the astronomical prevailing rents in New York City and most of the outlying areas are evidence that lots of people with lots of many live here and they drive prices Out Of Reach for a lot of middle inome folks and certainly poorer folks I'm not saying it's right or wrong I'm just presenting data in a completely objective and dispassionate way you decide what you think about it and that's all I got thanks for joining and thanks as always to the patrons for giving me the consistent month-to-month support that lets me change gears every week and this was that kind of week hey if you want to look at the genie number for whatever state or county or city or metro area you want I put the link down the description it's fun and a little disconcerting anyway keep the great topic suggestions coming I'll be back with a new episode next week and I'll see you then

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 174,640

Keywords: urbanism, urbanist, urban, urban talk, urbanism sociology, urban exploration, urbanism as a way of life, urbanism architecture, urbanist exploring cities, urbanist session, urban planning problems, urban planning, city planning, urban design, cities, cities skylines, urban planning career, urban planning degree, urban planning 101

Id: pyg5sr3pzl4

Length: 17min 29sec (1049 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2024