LOS ANGELES, July 23 (Xinhua) -- Greater Los Angeles
is the most economically segregated region in the country, with rich and poor
living poles apart, a study showed.
Only about 28 percent of Los Angeles' neighborhoods
are middle-class or mixed income, compared with more than half of those in other
cities like Nashville, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Portland, Oregan, according to
the study made public on Sunday.
The middle class in Los Angeles keeps shrinking, and
the rich and poor live in separate neighborhoods, said the research conducted by
demographers at Wayne State University in Detroit.
More than two-thirds of L.A.-area residents live in
neighborhoods that are solidly rich or poor, showing the city to be a region of
extreme polarization, where rich and poor live in separate neighborhoods,
surrounded by others like themselves, according to the research.
Los Angeles County "has more billionaires than any
other part of the country. It's also the capital of the working poor," said
Peter Dreier, chairman of the Urban and Environmental Policy Program at
Occidental College.
Los Angeles' suburbs also were among the nation's
most extreme. Only suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona and Palm Beach, Fla., were more
polarized, the researchers found.
Researchers attributed the faster pace of
polarization to a kind of self-sorting. In other words, people are moving out of
economically diverse neighborhoods to live in areas dominated by their own
income group.
"The situation in L.A. is certainly at the extreme of
American cities," said one of the study's authors, George Galster, a professor
of urban affairs at Wayne State University. Galster said he had studied 100
metropolitan regions and found that all of them have grown more economically
segregated over the last 30 years.
The trend parallels a well-documented loss of middle
income jobs in the United States over a generation. But the study found that
middle-class neighborhoods are disappearing at a much faster rate than the
comparable jobs.
Researchers attributed the faster pace to a kind of
self-sorting. In other words, people are moving out of economically diverse
neighborhoods to live in areas dominated by their own income group.
Other factors include the collapse of aerospace
industry in the early 1990s which forced many middle-class residents to leave
the region, and the influx of immigrants seeking work.
"I think that poses real challenges to any society,
politically and socially," Galster said. "The fact that our society is moving to
a situation where we don't rub shoulders on a daily basis means that, more and
more, people's impressions of others will not be formed by personal experience
but by images in the media."
The study defined neighborhoods by residential census
tracts, and defined middle income as between 80 percent and 120 percent of the
metropolitan area's median. Enditem
