Capital of US Income Gap Festers Amid Connecticut Mansions
22.05.12
(Updates to add Rosen comments under ‘Rising Tide' sub- headline. For more stories on the census, {TOP CENS <GO>})
Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Growing up in poverty on the streets of Bridgeport, Connecticut, Carlos Gonzalez sold heroin and crack cocaine and eventually landed in jail. Now he cleans the kitchens of Greenwich private schools and of financial companies UBS AG and Royal Bank of Scotland in Stamford.
“It's hard to see the wealth -- it feels so out of reach,” said Gonzalez, 42, who lives less than a mile from the now-demolished public housing project where his grandmother raised him in Connecticut's largest and fourth-poorest city. “I will never have that. So I just pray to God every day to give me the strength to go to work and do the right thing.”
Nowhere is the contrast between rich and poor clearer than in the metropolitan region abutting New York, stretching from Greenwich on the west to Bridgeport on the east. This 625- square-mile swath, where subsidized housing complexes sit blocks from multimillion-dollar mansions, is home to the widest income gap of any metro area in the U.S., according to Census Bureau data compiled by Bloomberg. If this region were a country, it would be the 14th-most unequal spot on the planet, ranking just below Brazil, based on figures in the CIA World Factbook.
Source: BusinessWeek