You may have heard expressions like, “they’re in a different tax bracket” or “we are the 99%.” These phrases, which pop up on social media, and in the occasional news headline, refer to the presence of income inequality in the United States. That is, they are concerned with the percentage of money people take home and the percentage of total dollars they earn in a given year.
Income inequality has long been measured on the national scale. It’s also been compared over time to help people understand whether the economic activity in a given place benefits all residents, or just a select few. Recent studies however, have gotten a bit more granular. They zoom in on income inequality at the neighborhood scale.
In the United States, high levels of inequality:
have been associated with poorer health outcomes,
are correlated with individual financial wellbeing,
impacts levels of social cohesion,
and influences a person’s perceptions about equality in America.
Studies on economic mobility, which have been particularly relevant to Charlotte in the last decade, found that social interactions among people of varying classes and incomes are a key ingredient to lifting children out of poverty.
In this article, we look at neighborhood-level (census tract) income inequality in the Charlotte region, using the Gini Coefficient published in the 2022 American Community Survey. The Gini Coefficient, sometimes known as the Gini Index, measures income inequality by comparing a perfectly equal distribution of income to the actual distribution in that neighborhood. For example, a Gini Index score of 0 would have 10% of households making 10% of the income, 20% making 20%, etc. A Gini Score of 1 means that 1 household gets 100% of the income. Therefore, a lower Gini Index score means there is less income inequality in that neighborhood.
