It’s Not Just the Superstar Cities That Are Getting Richer
The story that economic rewards keep flowing to the same places has some truth to it, but not the whole truth.
Pittsburgh might not be glamorous, but it’s doing all right.
Photographer: Ty Wright/Bloomberg
There has been a ton written over the past few months — some but far from all of it inspired by Amazon.com Inc.’s “second headquarters” search — about the diverging economic fortunes of America’s metropolitan areas. A lot of it has been very interesting and informative. Taken as a whole, though, it can be pretty confusing.
Are we, for example, supposed to be worrying about “The Growing Inequality Between America’s Superstar Cities, and the Rest,” as urban scholar Richard Florida wrote in CityLab last month, or cheering the fact that “Second-Tier Cities Boast First-Rate Job Figures,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Shayndi Raice reported a few days later?