Less discussed than the growing gaps between affluent and impoverished Americans, but equally insidious, is the fact that the ballooning economic gap has been accompanied by growing de facto segregation of Americans along class lines.38
In Port Clinton of the 1950s, affluent kids and poor kids lived near one another, went to school together, played and prayed together, and even dated one another. These kids received different economic and cultural endowments from their parents, of course, because Port Clinton was not a commune. However, kids (and their parents) had acquaintances and even close friends across class lines. Nowadays, by contrast, fewer and fewer of us, in Port Clinton and elsewhere, are exposed in our daily lives to people outside our own socioeconomic niche. Three different dimensions of class segregation show just how pervasively American society has become divided along class lines during the past forty years.
Neighborhoods are important sites of growing class segregation. The sorting of households into distinct neighborhoods by income was significantly higher in 2010 than it was in 1970.39 More and more families live either in uniformly affluent neighborhoods or in uniformly poor neighborhoods, as figure 1.4 shows, and fewer and fewer of us live in mixed or moderate income neighborhoods. This geographic polarization was made possible by the growth of suburbs and the expansion of the highway system, which allowed high-income families to move away from low-income neighbors in search of large lots, privacy, parks, and shopping malls. This class-based residential polarization has been accelerated by the growth of the income gap and (ironically) by changes in housing legislation that enabled more affluent minority families to move to the suburbs.