There is Inequality in Where the Top 1% Live

Stephen Higley, a retired geography professor from the University of Montevallo in Alabama has a website in which he uses census data to figure out where the richest among us in the US live. His latest analysis was picked up by The Atlantic, and the results are very interesting, even if not startling. The richest 1% of American households are clustered together in neighborhoods on the east and west coasts.

Higley compiled his list using data from the 2006-2010 American Community Survey, identifying contiguous block groups (a subdivision of census tracts) with a mean household income of $200,000 or more. (Note that it is possible that these mean household incomes are in fact underestimates, as households can only claim up to about $2 million in income on the American Community Survey.

America’s 1,000 richest neighborhoods are home to two million Americans, a group that makes up just 0.6 percent of the country’s population. The top 63 wealthiest neighborhoods have mean household incomes of $390,000 or above, making their average resident automatically a member of the country’s one percent. At the very top, 18 of these neighborhoods have mean household incomes above $500,000.

Here's the list of the top ten richest neighborhoods in the country.:



You can see that only one (East Lake Shore Drive in Chicago) is not on the east or west coast. You can also see that a disproportionate share of these (4 of 10) are in the general vicinity of Washington, DC. It seems to pay off to hang around the federal government.