Chicago, New York - No one is championing the middle class, even rhetorically

Chicago’s Vanishing Middle Class

by Aaron M. Renn

In the Windy City and elsewhere, a liberal top-bottom coalition drives it out.To the extent that the middle class abandons Chicago and New York, the Democratic Party’s stranglehold in such places will only tighten.

In cities around the world, two-tier societies are becoming increasingly common. While much ink has been spilled over widening income inequality in cities such as New York, where Bill de Blasio rode his “tale of two cities” theme all the way to City Hall, most attempts to solve the problem have focused on the poor, not the middle class. Liberal mayors across the country are proposing an array of policies intended to address income inequality, including minimum-wage hikes—Seattle’s mayor wants to raise it to $15 per hour—affordable-housing mandates, and tax increases on the wealthy. At the same time, they’ve made massive investments in upscale neighborhoods and business districts. But no one is championing the middle class, even rhetorically.

Chicago provides a striking case in point. Mayor Rahm Emanuel has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into initiatives benefiting the city’s elite, such as high-tech industry support, a $100 million “river walk” along the Chicago River, and “tax-increment financing” subsidies for major developments like a proposed basketball arena. And Emanuel has at least talked about boosting the fortunes of the poor by getting a handle on the city’s crime problem and improving education. Meanwhile, schools and mental-health clinics have closed in Chicago, and libraries have had their hours reduced, but Emanuel has so far done little talking or acting about the fate of Chicago’s middle class, which has declined remarkably over the last four decades, according to new research by University of Chicago graduate student Daniel Hertz. As the gray areas in Hertz’s map show, Chicago was mostly middle class in 1970. By 2012, Chicago’s middle class had radically shrunk, and the city was divided between upscale areas (green) and poor ones (red). Hertz has previously documented Chicago’s growing public-safety inequality gap and examined how Chicago’s upscale areas are experiencinggentrification in the public schools.

The plight of the middle class in cities like Chicago can’t be blamed entirely on liberal policies. The global economy has clearly benefited the talented, the educated, and the already wealthy, often at the expense of those in formerly middle-class occupations, like manufacturing. And it’s unlikely that the forces unleashed by globalization will diminish. One might expect, then, that big-city Democratic leaders like Emanuel or de Blasio would make a strong appeal to middle-class constituents.

They haven’t, because for liberal mayors, middle-class decline is convenient and politically advantageous. Much of America’s moneyed elite has already shifted its allegiance to the Left, especially in cities.
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