The "Great Divide" is rapidly becoming a Grand Canyon

The following alarming demographic shifts from www.russelsage.org hold immense import for all US businesses and all Advertising and Marketing campaigns and strategies in future periods.  

Just one quite dramatic effect will be that as this trend accelerates, it will dramatically affect the willingness and desire to show one's wealth to all those who have nothing! 

“New U.S. 2010 Report: Residential Income Segregation in America

November 16, 2011

“Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff of Stanford University have released a new U.S. 2010 report entitled "More Unequal and More Separate: Growth in the Residential Segregation of Families by Income, 1970-2009." Here's the abstract:

As overall income inequality grew in the last four decades, high- and low-income families have become increasingly less likely to live near one another. Mixed income neighborhoods have grown rarer, while affluent and poor neighborhoods have grown much more common. ,,,population . . .who live in the poorest and most affluent neighborhoods has more than doubled … while the share of families living in middle-income neighborhoods dropped from 65 percent to 44 percent. The residential isolation of the both poor and affluent families has grown over the last four decades, though affluent families have been generally more residentially isolated than poor families during this period.. . The increasing concentration of income and wealth (and therefore of resources such as schools, parks, and public services) in a small number of neighborhoods results in greater disadvantages for the remaining neighborhoods where low- and middle-income families live.

Writing in today's New York Times, Sabrina Tavernise says the report "raises, but does not answer, the question of whether increased economic inequality, and the resulting income segregation, impedes social mobility":

Much of the shift is the result of changing income structure in the United States. Part of the country’s middle class has slipped to the lower rungs of the income ladder as manufacturing and other middle-class jobs have dwindled,…Put simply, there are fewer people in the middle.

But the shift is more than just changes in income. The study also found that there is more residential sorting by income, with the rich flocking together in new exurbs and gentrifying pockets where lower- and middle-income families cannot afford to live.