Are the Suburbs Where the American Dream Goes to Die?

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http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/07/are-the-suburbs-where-the-american-dream-goes-to-die/278014/



Rumors of the American Dream's demise have been greatly exaggerated -- at least in parts of America.

That's the message of a new study that looks at the connection between geography and social mobility in the United States. It turns out modern-day Horatio Algers have just as much a chance in much of the country as they do anywhere else in the world today. But if you want to move up, don't move to the South. As you can see in the chart below from David Leonhardt's write-up in the New York Times, the American Dream is on life support below the Mason Dixon line.

So why does a kid from the bottom fifth in the South or the Rust Belt have such a hard time making it to the top fifth? It's not how progressive local taxes are. Or the cost of college. Or how unequal a place is. At least not much. The research team of Raj Chetty and Nathanial Hendren of Harvard and Patrick Kline and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California-Berkeley found that these factors only correlated slightly with a region's social mobility. What seems to matter more is the amount of sprawl, the number of two-parent households, the quality of elementary and high schools, and how involved people are in things like religious and community groups.

The suburbs didn't quite kill the American Dream, but a particular type did. That's the low-density and racially-polarized suburbs that have defined places like Atlanta. Indeed, as you can see in the chart below from Paul Krugman, there's a noticeable relationship between a metro area's density and its social mobility.



As usual, the elephant in the room here is race. So let's address it: the researchers found that the larger the black population, the lower upward mobility. But on closer inspection, this has something to do with population density too. I went back to the Census data, and looked at the same ten cities Krugman did, but this time I compared their population-density ratios and the percent of their population that's black. There isn't nearly a perfect relationship -- look at Boston or Dallas or Houston -- but there is a relationship.

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1. Not sure how they are measuring "sprawl"

But it's hard to understand how DC can have substantially MORE sprawl than LA does. There are height restrictions on buildings in DC, but that suggests that the sprawl measure really is more a measure of high rise apartments and condos in a metro area.