Urban Income Mobility Patterns in the United States: 1980-2010

Wei Kang, Sergio Rey, Elijah Knaap

‘Spatial income inequality between neighborhoods within and across cities has been attractingsubstantive attention. As a static view cannot provide a complete picture for understanding thedriving processes of urbanization and spatial polarization, this paper turns its lens to spatial incomemobility, which ties together spatial inequality at different moments in time and provides insights intothe underlying inequality dynamics. Specifically, this paper provides an empirical study of the urbanspatial income mobility in the United States with the decennial census and American CommunitySurvey (ACS) datasets for 294 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) over periods 1980, 1990, 2000,and 2010. We use decomposition methods to unpack the overall spatial mobility into contributingcomponents, which are Exchange, Growth, and Dispersion mobility, to get new insights into themultidimensional urban processes. One focal point is to investigate the dominant force, as wellas whether, how, and why it changed across space and over time. We find a very clear declinetrend in the dominant position of Growth mobility, along with a trend of Exchange mobility graduallydominating the overall process over 1980-2010, indicating a high level of temporal heterogeneity inthe spatial income inequality dynamics which remains underexplored in the current literature. Thetemporal heterogeneity is also reflected in how the spatial income mobility within each MSA evolved,and how this has been driven by different socioeconomic factors over time.’