What Does Opportunity Look Like Where You Live?

The inequality in life expectancy highlights another problem: The country’s cities — historically the nation’s engines of opportunity — often exacerbate inequities today.

Here, we’re presenting a series of charts that highlight both the promise and the problem of American cities. If you want to enter your county, we will highlight it throughout the article:

We’re going to start with income, which helps drive so many other trends. Over the past 50 years, the average income in nearly every metro area has soared:

But these numbers don’t tell the full story. The average has risen in part because incomes for the affluent have soared. Incomes for the middle class and poor have risen much less rapidly:

Those numbers are snapshots, which don’t follow the same people over the course of their lives. But studies that do track the course of people’s lives show an even more alarming pattern: Many people who grow up in low- and middle-income families are struggling to climb up the income ladder.

Recent research has tracked children who grew up in families in the bottom 25 percent of incomes between 1978 and 1983. What happened to their incomes when they reached adulthood? This chart tells that story:

One of the forces holding down economic mobility is physical mobility. People living in higher-income neighborhoods typically live near good schools and good jobs.

In lower-income areas, many people must spend long stretches of time getting to and from work. These commutes take them away from their families and make child care, among many things, more difficult:

In addition to the growth in inequality within metro areas, inequality across metro areas has also surged. A small number of areas account for a large and growing share of jobs, income, wealth, venture-capital funding and more.

One example: The largest and most prosperous metro areas, like New York and San Francisco, now attract an even larger share of college graduates than in the past. In some of the largest metro areas, like New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, more than half of adults have a bachelor’s degree. In less populated areas, less than one quarter of adults often do:

These metro areas also have a larger share of the country’s jobs than in the past. Between 2010 and 2016, New York County — the borough of Manhattan — accounted for almost 2 percent of the nation’s employment growth, despite having only about 0.5 percent of the population:

In the largest metro areas, broadband internet access is close to universal. In smaller metro areas and rural regions, a sizeable share of the population often lacks it:

The same patterns show up with venture capital investment. More than 70 percent of it has recently flowed to only three states: California, New York and Massachusetts:

Cities are still the country’s most economically dynamic places. But they are also a microcosm of the extreme inequality that shapes so much of American life in the early 21st century.

Most areas are doing far worse than a small number of the most prosperous cities. And even within those prosperous cities, most residents are doing worse than the impressive headline statistics suggest.