The middle class in Racine, Wisc., enjoys the highest median income, at $81,283. “The recovery, in terms of income, hasn’t been strong”. “In areas large and small”. Upper-income households made double the median, which is the middle point where half of households make more and half make less.
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Wendell Nolen, 52, has experienced the slide from middle-class status firsthand.
But the largest metros in the country fall into this group, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and Washington.
Metro Denver’s share of upper-income households increased 1 percentage point to 25 percent, while lower-income households rose 4 percentage points to 22 percent, according to Pew. Between 2000 and 2014 employment in the manufacturing industry decreased by 29 percent.
In Lane County, a three-person household in 2014 needed to have an income before taxes of between $40,976 and $122,926 to be considered middle income.
From 2000 to 2014, the share of adults living in middle income households fell in 203 of 229 USA metropolitan areas, according to Pew’s analysis of government data. The Chicago metropolitan area was slightly greater – $44,389 to $133,170 – because the cost of living is 6.6 percent higher than the national average. It found a ton of troubling information about America’s withering middle class. “In fact, Sheboygan is an area where the incomes of the middle class fell by just about the most”, said Kochhar. In a December poll, Pew found that most Americans feel the government isn’t doing enough to help the middle class.
The percentage of adults high-income households grew in 172, or 75 percent, of the 229 metro areas.
“Nationally, the size of the middle class has continued to shrink in the New Century”, Pew researcher Richard Fry said.
Meanwhile, social mobility is fading as people who aren’t born into the upper-income levels of society are less likely to join their ranks, writes Richard V. Reeves, an economist at the left-leaning Brookings Institution. The national share of American adults decreased, from 55 percent in 2000 to 51 percent in 2014. “T$3 his movement reflects more inequality in income and can be a hindrance to economic growth”.
The decline of the American middle class is “a pervasive local phenomenon”, according to Pew, which analyzed census and American Community Survey data in 229 metros across the country, encompassing about three-quarters of the us population.
The shift away from the middle class did not always mean a ballooning lower class, Pew found.
But the overall picture is cause for worry, not celebration.
Stockton saw its upper income percentage grow from 13.7 percent in 2000 to 14.9 percent in 2014.
The Rust Belt city of Springfield, Ohio, saw a 16 percent decline in economic status, tying it with Goldsboro, North Carolina, the home to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, as the biggest losers of economic status. In 2014, Pew said this equaled $42,000 to $125,000 annually for a household of three. “The contribution of this report is to say, ‘How widespread is it?’ The answer is that it’s very, very widespread”. In some metros, the middle class is dwindling primarily because families are falling out of it and into the lower class.
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In some instances, the numbers are rounded.
