Another day, another study showing just how outrageous income inequality is in San Francisco. Except this study, from the Brookings Institution, also indicates just how much richer the city's elite is getting year by year.
How much richer, you ask? According to the study, the top five percent of San Francisco households earned $423,000 in 2013, which is $66K more than they earned in 2012. That's a staggering 18 percent increase. As Bloomberg notes, it's also more than the state's median household income ($61,320 in 2013); enough to pay 12 months' rent on a single-family home; or cover a year's tuition and expenses at Stanford.
Though the sample size is admittedly small, it still confirms what many of us already suspect: the city's rich are getting ever more loaded. The data, obtained from a 2014 update to the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, shows that income inequality tends to be widest in large cities such as Atlanta, Boston, Miami, Washington DC, and San Francisco. Smaller, inland cities tend to have the narrowest gap between have and have-nots: Oklahoma City, Columbus, Nashville, and Las Vegas were among the most equitable.
One bit of (maybe) good news: incomes in the city's bottom 20 percent also increased — by about $3,000. Indeed, incomes in that bracket jumped from $21,500 in 2012 to $24,800 in 2013 (a 15 percent increase, and the highest for that income bracket among the 50 cities surveyed). As the report notes: "Incomes near the bottom could have increased due in part to very-low-income households leaving the city, perhaps because of affordability challenges. The fact that Oakland, Calif. also saw significant income growth at the lower end may signal that a strong Bay Area economy lifted all boats; or low-income households in Oakland may have also experienced affordability pressures similar to their counterparts across the Bay." In other words, statistically higher incomes among the city's poor may be due to the city's very poor having had to leave San Francisco altogether.
It puts things in perspective, that’s for sure. While it's great that low-income households are earning more as well, a $3,000 annual raise is barely enough to cover a month's rent in some neighborhoods. It's enough to piss you off.
[h/t Bloomberg; photo courtesy of ThinkStock]
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