Rice expert available to discuss good news, bad news about income equality in Houston

EXPERT ALERT

Amy McCaig
713-348-6777
amym@rice.edu

Rice expert available to discuss good news, bad news about income equality in Houston

HOUSTON – (March 18, 2015) – There’s good news and bad news about income equality in Houston, according to a new study from the Brookings Institute. Kyle Shelton, a postdoctoral research fellow at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, examined the study in a new blog and is available to discuss it with members of the media.

The good news: According to the report, Houston is one of only two major American cities where the average income of both the city’s wealthiest (top 5 percent) and poorest (bottom 20 percent) residents increased. (The other city was Jacksonville, Fla.) By contrast, most other urban areas saw the incomes of the rich rise without a similar increase in the income of the poor, as was the case in San Francisco, New York and Dallas.

The bad news: Shelton noted that Houston remains among the most unequal cities in the nation. Houston’s richest residents make 11.8 times the average income of the poorest residents ($220,582 and $18,759, respectively).

“That’s slightly above the national average for the country’s 50 largest cities (11.6 times) and significantly above the nation as a whole (9.6 times),” Shelton said.

He said that by this measure, Houston was the 15th most unequal city in the nation in 2013.

“While this is technically an improvement over 2012 (when it ranked 11th), the gap between rich and poor remained pretty much the same,” he said. “So the city’s improvement in the rankings had mostly to do with four other cities becoming more unequal – Detroit, Cleveland, Minneapolis and Dallas – and little to do with Houston making improvements on income inequality on its own.”

To read the full blog, visit kinder.rice.edu.

Rice University has a VideoLink ReadyCam TV interview studio. ReadyCam is capable of transmitting broadcast-quality standard-definition and high-definition video directly to all news media organizations around the world 24/7.

To arrange an interview with Shelton, contact Amy McCaig, senior media relations specialist at Rice, at 713-348-6777 or amym@rice.edu. 

-30-

Follow Rice News and Media Relations on Twitter @RiceUNews.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,888 undergraduates and 2,610 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked among some of the top schools for best quality of life by the Princeton Review and for best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to http://tinyurl.com/AboutRiceU.