We like to think of the United States as an equal-opportunity kind of country, where people who work hard get rewarded, and where it’s possible for anyone to end up better off than their parents were. But, according data from a new study, it turns out that geography has a huge impact on the odds that children born to poor families will rise into the middle class, or whether kids born into wealthy families will stay that way.
According to the study by a team of top academic economists, income mobility varies widely across the country. (Income mobility measures how likely a person born at the top is likely to stay there, and how much of a chance a person born to lesser means has to end up better off than her parents.) In Atlanta, for example, only 4 percent of kids raised in families making less than $25,000 (the poorest 20 percent of the country) end up in the top-earning 20 percent, making $107,000 or more. But in Salt Lake City, kids’ chance of rising to the top of the income ladder was nearly three times as high. “Where you grow up matters,” Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and one of the study’s authors, told the New York Times. “There is tremendous variation across the U.S. in the extent to which kids can rise out of poverty.”
In general, the southeast is one the least upwardly-mobile region in the nation. The worst cities for income mobility are Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Columbus. In contrast, the northeast, Great Plains, and the west of the country provide a greater chance to climb out of poverty; the top metro areas for income mobility are New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and much of Minnesota and California.
Unfortunately, this is one case in which Baltimore is more of a southern city than a northern one. A child growing up in a poor family in Baltimore — that is, one where the parents earned less than $16,000 a year — will most likely end up poor, too. That child has a 39 percent chance of remaining in the lowest-earning quintile, and only a 6 percent chance of rising to the top.
