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The rise of income stratification in greater Boston

The Globe takes a look.

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The very rich are not participating in middle class community. Robt Putnam seems to think they would if they were living near poor people.

I don't see it. The tech class is chasing a very different culture.

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From a statistical perspective, the income stratification can be explained mostly by socio-economic currents. There are more households with a single parent, which of course lags greatly the incomes of two parent households. That leads to stratification right there. None of the lower income people interviewed by the Globe were male, and that is telling. Dual incomes opens doors for the next generation.

That said, one of the points of the article and Putnam's book is that there is less interaction between different socioeconomic groups in Boston and the nation overall. I was en eutero when the first data point, the 1970 census, was taken. I was raised solidly middle class, but even within the neighborhoods in which I was raised, there was class mixing. On the one hand, I was grammar school classmates with the sons of a politically connected guy and a union boss, but I didn't know much about the fathers until years later. On the other hand, kids I played around with as kids ended up in jail. I don't know if Waquiot Jr will ever have that diversity (thank God he will grow up with racial diversity, though). Honestly, I'm glad that I run into the fathers of his preschool classmates, since, as I write above, I think two parent households are the most stable.

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I don't know if it's born out by the data, but my impression is that along with the two parent/one parent dynamic, a lot of this also has to do with the different levels of the middle class and who's leaving the city.

Anecdotally, I look around my neighborhood and I think the rental apartments which used to be occupied by working class / lower middle class families are being steadily converted into condos which are sold to richer middle class professional types. So I used to have a neighbor who worked for the cable company, but now I have a medical resident. My two other neighbors have lived in their houses since the 70s and 80s which is why they don't need to have professional type jobs to live there.

The working class families who do have a great situation because they bought their houses in the 90s or before though have the interesting pressure that they can realize a great windfall by selling out and moving out of the city, often because of retirement. So even if they wanted to sell their house to their kids for $1 or whatever, they have to pass up a gain of likely several hundred thousand dollars to do that. I like living here enough, but I don't know if I'd stay if I could make $300k profit selling my house, especially if my kids were out of school.

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Also the fact that college women are only marrying college men, and except at the very top, are continuing to work after their kids are born in high-income occupations.

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Charles Murray has been writing about this for more than two decades. To whatever degree this is a problem, it's not clear there is a solution.

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