COLUMBUS, Ohio – The disparity between the richest Columbus residents and the poorest is not as wide as in most large American cities, according to new research from one of Washington’s most respected think tanks.
In a paper entitled “All cities are not created unequal,” published on Feb. 20, the centrist Brookings Institution ranked Columbus near the bottom of the list of U.S. cities with the largest income gaps between rich and poor.
The study found that the gap between the highest-earning 5 percent of Columbus households and the lowest-earning 20 percent was narrower than all but 10 of the nation’s 50 largest cities. The gap was about half what is in Atlanta and San Francisco, the cities at the top of the list.
The cities were ranked by “95/20 ratio,” described by author as “the distance between a household that just cracks the top 5 percent by income, and one that just falls into the bottom 20 percent.” The ratio for the 50 largest cities was 10.8, compared to 9.1 for the country as a whole. The ratio for Columbus was 8.6 percent, lowest of all of Ohio’s large cities.
“A city where the rich are very rich, and the poor very poor, is likely to face many difficulties. It may struggle to maintain mixed-income school environments that produce better outcomes for low-income kids. It may have too narrow a tax base from which to sustainably raise the revenues necessary for essential city services. And it may fail to produce housing and neighborhoods accessible to middle-class workers and families, so that those who move up or down the income ladder ultimately have no choice but to move out” author Alan Berube wrote in the study.
According to the data, the average household income of those in the bottom 20 percent in Columbus in 2012 was $17,238, a decline of $1,134 since 2007. During that time, the average household income among the highest-earning 5 percent grew $1,295 to $147, 496.
Atlanta, San Francisco, Miami, Boston and Washington topped the list.
Arlington, Texas, boasted the narrowest margin between rich and poor, along with Mesa, Ariz., and Las Vegas.