Key to climbing out of poverty: Location, location, location

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In 1970s sitcom America, George and “Weezie” Jefferson were able move on up from a derelict neighborhood to Archie and Edith Bunker’s working-class neighborhood and then, finally to a deluxe apartment in the sky on Manhattan’s wealthy East Side. They were finally getting their piece of the pie.

In today’s real America, it’s not that easy. Since the 1970s, income inequality in America and“the hollowing out of the middle class” has increased at an historic rate.

And now there is new research, published this week, showing that when it comes to the chances that a poor child born in America can climb up from the lowest rungs on the economic ladder, where that child lives may be more telling than previously thought. The researchers started by looking narrowly at questions of tax policy for poor parents, when they discovered something surprising but unmistakable in their data.

“Location matters, place matters,” says Nathaniel  Hendren, a Harvard professor and one of the authors of the study. When it comes to a low-income child having a chance to climb up the economic ladder, “it matters where you grow up.”

That climb, the study shows, happens most commonly in the Northeast and the West, along with parts of the upper Midwest and much of Texas. New York, Boston, Seattle, Salt Lake City and Houston give a poor child a decent fighting chance. (In the map below, lighter colors indicate higher mobility; darker colors indicate lower mobility).

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