Los Angeles economically polarized: study

Greater Los Angeles is the most economically segregated region in the country, with rich and poor living poles apart, a study showed.

Only about 28 percent of Los Angeles' neighborhoods are middle- class or mixedincome, compared with more than half of those in other cities like Nashville, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Portland, Oregan, according to the study made public on Sunday.

The middle class in Los Angeles keeps shrinking, and the rich and poor live in separate neighborhoods, said the research conducted by demographers at Wayne State University in Detroit.

More than two-thirds of L.A.-area residents live in neighborhoods that are solidly rich or poor, showing the city to be a region of extreme polarization, where rich and poor live in separate neighborhoods, surrounded by others like themselves, according to the research.

Los Angeles County "has more billionaires than any other part of the country. It's also the capital of the working poor," said Peter Dreier, chairman of the Urban and Environmental Policy Program at Occidental College.

Los Angeles' suburbs also were among the nation's most extreme. Only suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona and Palm Beach, Fla., were more polarized, the researchers found.

Researchers attributed the faster pace of polarization to a kind of self-sorting. In other words, people are moving out of economically diverse neighborhoods to live in areas dominated by their own income group.

"The situation in L.A. is certainly at the extreme of American cities," said one of the study's authors, George Galster, a professor of urban affairs at Wayne State University. Galster said he had studied 100 metropolitan regions and found that all of them have grown more economically segregated over the last 30 years.

The trend parallels a well-documented loss of middleincome jobs in the United States over a generation. But the study found that middle-class neighborhoods are disappearing at a much faster rate than the comparable jobs.

Researchers attributed the faster pace to a kind of self- sorting. In other words, people are moving out of economically diverse neighborhoods to live in areas dominated by their own income group.

Other factors include the collapse of aerospace industry in the early 1990s which forced many middle-class residents to leave the region, and the influx of immigrants seeking work.

"I think that poses real challenges to any society, politically and socially," Galster said. "The fact that our society is moving to a situation where we don't rub shoulders on a daily basis means that, more and more, people's impressions of others will not be formed by personal experience but by images in the media."

The study defined neighborhoods by residential census tracts, and defined middle income as between 80 percent and 120 percent of the metropolitan area's median.

Source: Xinhua