The 2014 study that said the Charlotte area had the worst economic mobility among the nation’s largest 50 metro areas has been updated, with new information that gives insight into why Charlotte ranked so low. It also has surprising data that shows that Mecklenburg County isn’t as bleak as previously thought.
The original “Land of Opportunity Study,” led by a team from Harvard and the University of California-Berkeley, tracked the tax returns of 40 million children and their parents. The study examined children born in the early 1980s to see how they fared in their early 30s by examining tax returns through 2012. The main question: How many children who grew up poor moved to the top quintile or top 20%?
The report, also known as the Chetty study, found that the Charlotte commuting zone, which includes three counties in South Carolina and six in North Carolina, was at the bottom. It became a rallying cry here for governmental and civic leaders, who were embarrassed by our poor showing. How could a city with so much apparent wealth do so poorly by its most vulnerable residents? Charlotte leaders responded with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Opportunity task force, which came up with 91 recommendations to improve economic mobility here.
Since then, the study has been updated with tax returns through 2015. And the same research team that did the original study matched the new information with census data to see how different racial and ethnic groups fared, as well as immigrants and native-born residents — information that wasn’t available in the 2014 findings.
In the Charlotte area, there is more mobility when looking specifically at Mecklenburg County as opposed to more rural counties that were included in the original study, like Chester County, South Carolina.
And Mecklenburg County fares better when looking at mobility based on individual incomes instead of household incomes. The original 50 out of 50 study looked at household income.
Isabel Sawhill, of the Brookings Institution, studies economic mobility. She said she remembers seeing Chetty’s color-coded map of economic mobility for all races and ethnicities.
“The first time I saw the Chetty map — you looked at the South and the whole South looked terrible,” she said. “And the first time I saw that, I thought that’s got to be about race.”
She said the updated data is important because it lets cities understand what groups are falling behind.
This story is part of I Can’t Afford to Live Here, a collaborative reporting project focused on solutions to the affordable housing crisis in Charlotte.