a new study by the non-partisan Pew Research Center, shared with the Financial Times, points to just how widespread the damage to America’s middle has been and how divided the country’s class structures are becoming.
Median incomes fell in four-fifths of the 229 metropolitan areas studied by Pew, with the share of middle-income adults decreasing in 203 areas. At the same time the portion of lower-income adults rose in 160 metropolitan areas between 1999 and 2014 while the share of upper-income households rose in 172.
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But while Raleigh’s population continues to grow, the new data from Pew shows that the robust population growth has not necessarily translated into higher incomes for its new residents. The benefits of the boom have been shared unequally.
The inflation-adjusted annual median income for a household of three in Raleigh fell by more than $10,000 to $74,283 in 2014 from $85,784 in 1999, even as its population grew by two-thirds to more than 1.3m people from just under 800,000.
More surprisingly, the only income group to grow as a share of the population was its poorest. In 1999 one in five residents of the metropolitan area lived in households making two-thirds or less of the median income. By 2014 that figure had grown to one in four.
Even as Raleigh has sought to attract college graduates, the Pew data show the metropolitan area’s middle class — those living in households making between roughly $42,000 and $125,000 — has shrunk as a portion of the population to 50 per cent in 2014, from 55 per cent at the turn of the century.
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Raleigh is not the only bastion of the new economy to be dealing with such problems. In the areas surrounding tech-friendly San Francisco and neighbouring San Jose, both median incomes and the middle class’s share of the population have fallen. In Austin, a more direct rival to Raleigh, median incomes for a household of three fell to just over $74,000 from just under $78,000 in 1999.