Bill Rankin at Radical Cartography got interested in the idea of “income doughnuts.” The idea is, he says, that “a city will create concentric rings of wealth and poverty, with the rich both in the suburbs and in the “revitalized” downtown, and the poor stuck in between.”

He goes on:

This does seem to have some validity in older cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago, but in newer cities it is not the case. Instead of donuts, one finds “wedges” of wealth occupying a continuous pie-slice from the center to the periphery.

True enough. Here’s his map of the income distribution of several major US cities. Seattle/Tacoma is about halfway down the page.

Easy enough to see the tech-industry and Microsoft money on the Eastside, and the pockets of high-income folks all around the waterfronts. And the much lower income brackets around Tacoma and Fort Lewis…though I wonder how much that will change in the next census, at least for rapidly gentrifying downtown Tacoma.

(via kottke.org)

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