Those Outer Boroughs Are Looking Pretty Good Right Now

The Times studied the situation and determined that Manhattan has the widest income gap of any county in the nation, confirming that the borough is for the very rich or, I guess just the very rich:

Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue is only about 60 blocks from the Wagner Houses in East Harlem, but they might as well be light years apart. They epitomize the highest- and lowest-earning census tracts in Manhattan, where the disparity between rich and poor is now greater than in any other county in the country.

That finding, in an analysis conducted for The New York Times, dovetails with other new regional economic research, which identifies the Bronx as the poorest urban county in the country and suggests that the middle class in New York State is being depleted.

The top fifth of earners in Manhattan now make 52 times what the lowest fifth make – $365,826 compared with $7,047 – which is roughly comparable to the income disparity in Namibia, according to the Times analysis of 2000 census data. Put another way, for every dollar made by households in the top fifth of Manhattan earners, households in the bottom fifth made about 2 cents.

That represents a substantial widening of the income gap from previous years. In 1980, the top fifth of earners made 21 times what the bottom fifth made in Manhattan, which ranked 17th among the nation’s counties in income disparity.

Of course you can’t mention Trump Tower in the first paragraph without setting up something special in the last paragraph (see Chekhov’s gun). Something special like a quote from The Donald himself (!), who is put in the untenable position of having to defend the income gap:

“The income gap, while supposedly increasing, seems to be a natural phenomenon,” said the developer Donald J. Trump, who lives in Trump Tower. “Times have been good, but times have been good for many people and many classes of people. I think there is a very large middle class – but not in this section, by the way.”