Where income inequality has fallen the fastest in America

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Where income inequality has fallen the fastest in America

What we can learn from the counties that have seen the biggest drop in inequality.

Uneven Recovery

By Lydia DePillis and Jeff Guo September 18

Howard Bradley knows what equality looks like. ... The son of a nurse and a firefighter, he grew up in a neighborhood of Springfield, Tenn., characterized by what he calls “genteel poverty”: People didn’t have a lot of money, but they had enough to eat, and their homes were well-kept. Everybody went to the same high school, so the poor and the relatively wealthy did the same homework and competed on the same teams.

“If everybody’s poor, you don’t feel poor,” says Bradley, 60, who then went on to teach history at that same high school for 26 years. “It was people trying to put on their best face.”

These days, Bradley is the county mayor of Robertson County, where he’s lived all his life. And recently, he’s presided over something of a triumph: the biggest reduction in income inequality over the past five years, among counties with more than 60,000 people, according to data released today by the Census Department. That’s particularly remarkable at a time when the metric used to measure income disparity — known as the Gini coefficient — has stayed flat for the rest of America, after decades of the rich getting richer while the poor were stuck in place.
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Manufacturing and construction and retail, however, are not the only ways for a county to bolster its middle class. The county with the second biggest drop in inequality, Monongalia County, WV, has a very different story to tell: The small city of Morgantown is the home of West Virginia University, where enrollment has burgeoned through the recession, especially by out-of-state students. It also has several large federal agencies, including the Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Library, as well as two fast-growing hospitals and the generic drug manufacturer Mylan Pharmaceuticals. Finally, it’s seen a nice bump in employment from nearby fracking activity, which requires back-office jobs that show up in and around Morgantown.