, Columnist
Income Ladder Is Difficult to Climb for US Metro Areas
It seems a lot easier to fall from the top (as Detroit did) than to rise from the bottom. Why is that?
The Tampa-St. Petersburg area has remained near the bottom of the income rankings since 1949.
Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
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In 1949, the list of the country’s most affluent metropolitan areas was dominated by Midwestern industrial cities.
Many of those places aren’t so affluent anymore, relatively speaking. I assembled a version of this chart for a column a few weeks ago about the fortunes of San Francisco and Detroit, and it engendered much commentary on social media about the fleeting nature of regional economic success.