Service Workers Shall Inherit the City
Hospitality and retail wages are catching up to knowledge workers, who will find urban life less tempting as prices rise.
As urban retail workers earn more, urban retail prices will rise, and some of today’s shoppers will move away.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
American cities are following a new script.
Over the past generation, high-cost cities like New York and San Francisco have been transformed by rising inequality and high housing costs in a winner-take-all economy. The past couple of years, though, are different. New economic realities, with service workers’ wage growth outpacing overall wage growth and big tech companies increasingly looking to diversify their geographic footprints, should reduce overall inequality but make high-cost cities uneconomical for many of the types of workers who have flocked to them.