CityLab, August 1, 2019: The double whammy: Housing and income inequality
America today faces a two-headed problem: economic inequality and housing inequality. The former has soared to heights not seen since the Gilded Age. The latter, as home prices spike in coastal superstar cities and lag in much of the country’s middle, has become a main feature of our divided, winner-take-all geography.
The two phenomena are intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Together, they act as a brake on the performance of the economy and limit both migration and upward mobility.
Those are the big takeaways from a new working paper by researchers at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Tamim Bayoumi and Jelle Barkema examine the connections between economic inequality and housing inequality on the one hand, and migration and economic mobility on the other, across the two-decade period spanning 1996 to 2016.
