Introduction by Smith Young “:)”  See WSJ article below and related WSJ article , click The Carving Out of the Urban Middle Class and use buttons to see demographic changes in median household income for 1970, 1990, and 2014.  The changes are amazing showing three examples of U.S. cities where concentrated wealth has risen next to a rapid decline in median income.

In contrast, click HUD’s data mapping tool (Need an example?  Use Arapahoe County (CDBG), CO as your jurisdiction and select and enjoy the the Racial map.) will be used for the purpose of for example identifying identifying racially/ethnically-concentrated areas of poverty (R/ECAPs) where protected classes disproportionately reside.  This is and example of where the community taking grants is required to consider the listed factors and any other factors affecting the jurisdiction and region.  Identify factors that significantly create, contribute to, perpetuate, or increase the severity of R/ECAPs.

• Community Opposition
• Deteriorated and abandoned properties
• Displacement of residents due to economic pressures
• Lack of community revitalization strategies
• Lack of private investments in specific neighborhoods
• Lack of public investments in specific neighborhoods, including services or amenities
• Lack of regional cooperation
• Land use and zoning laws
• Location and type of affordable housing
• Occupancy codes and restrictions
• Private discrimination

WSJ – For More U.S. Cities, Downtown Is a Center of Economic Strength

 By SCOTT CALVERT
Aug. 5, 2016

PHILADELPHIA—Theresa Lounsbery sets out from her apartment in this city’s blue-collar Lower Northeast section each workday. Her neighborhood, Oxford Circle, a district of 2 square miles, has been hammered by manufacturing’s long slide. Median household income in her immediate area is down more than 30% since 2000 to roughly $37,000.

But less than 40 minutes later, the 43-year-old sat on an elevated train approaching Philadelphia’s Center City, a 7.7-square-mile mini-boomtown framed by a skyline about to reach new heights with a 1,121-foot office tower under construction. The median income in parts of greater Center City has shot up nearly 90% to $80,000 in the past 15 years. High-earners scoop up townhouses for $800,000 or more, while businesses and law firms lease gleaming office space.

Ms. Lounsbery moved to Oxford Circle with her teenage sons two years ago because of cheap rent: $670 a month for a two-bedroom apartment on the upper floor of a row house. A preschool teacher for 10 years, Ms. Lounsbery studied to be a paralegal to earn more money after her divorce. Last summer, she started working at a personal-injury law firm, making double her teacher’s salary and gaining a foothold in the Center City economy.

Theresa Lounsbery commutes from her home in Philadelphia’s Oxford Circle neighborhood to downtown Center City.PHOTO: KEVIN COOK FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Ms. Lounsbery’s 10-mile commute highlights the little-noticed polarization under way in many postindustrial cities in the Northeast and Midwest.

For years, economists and urban experts talked about the doughnut hole of decay in city centers. But increasingly, many urban cores are islands of economic strength surrounded by decay that reaches out into inner-ring suburbs—beyond which fortunes rise again in more distant suburbs.

Polarization has increased within other U.S. cities, where a turnaround for city centers has been accompanied by economic decline or stagnation in many longtime middle-class enclaves and lower-income neighborhoods with high minority populations, according to a census data analysis by The Wall Street Journal.

Many neighborhoods within city limits are sinking amid a continuing loss of lower-skilled jobs offering good wages, while downtowns benefit from an influx of often well-educated young adults drawn to urban living, and the arrival of businesses eager to hire them.

As in Philadelphia, gains in the heart of many U.S. cities have come at a time of wider neighborhood decline, the Journal analysis found. Since 2000, median income has fallen in a majority of census tracts in Buffalo, Baltimore, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee and Chicago, all of which saw their downtown districts improve.

Developers are squeezing in more high-end housing around Baltimore’s revitalized waterfront. A new office tower is rising in Milwaukee that will be the city’s second-tallest. And Chicago boasts a parade of corporations relocating downtown.

As gentrification battles in hot global cities such as New York and San Francisco attract national focus, many more cities would like to spread recent economic gains in their urban core across the city, rather than temper them.

Job gains are concentrated in urban centers, largely to the benefit of downtown-area residents and suburban commuters, leaving many city dwellers with few good options, said Alan Mallach, a senior fellow at the Flint, Mich.-based think tank Center for Community Progress. Mr. Mallach has studied such polarization in former industrial cities including Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

People in their 20s and early 30s now make up 40% of downtown residents in Philadelphia. Lunch hour in Center City, top, and the morning rush hour, above.PHOTOS: MICHELLE GUSTAFSON FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Over the past three decades, neighborhoods in urban cores have been growing richer, whiter and better educated, according to a study by Nathaniel Baum-Snow, a University of Toronto associate business economics professor, and Daniel Hartley, a Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago economist.

A study by City Observatory, a Portland, Ore., think tank focused on urban data analysis, found a tripling over the past four decades of urban census tracts where at least 30% of people live in poverty. Its authors, who analyzed a 10-mile radius around the city center in the 51 largest metros, found many more areas shifted into high poverty than experienced economic gains.

Overall, Philadelphia, the nation’s fifth-most-populous city, notched a 14.3% decline in median income from 2000 to 2014 on an inflation-adjusted basis, a drop that exceeded the 10.4% nationwide decrease. The census data analyzed by the Journal showed income gains in Philadelphia over the past 15 years have clustered around flourishing Center City.

For every area of the city that had income growth, more than two other parts posted drops—including swaths of traditionally middle-class Northeast Philadelphia, a 45-square-mile area that reaches to the city line and where more than a quarter of the city’s 1.57 million people live. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, elected last fall, has said residents’ ZIP Code shouldn’t determine their future.