In the United States, visions of poverty are much more commonplace than extreme wealth. And that’s an issue
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On January 4, 2015, Henry Grabar writes on Salon:
The southernmost road from Miami Beach to Miami is called the MacArthur Causeway. In good weather, it’s a blissful drive. Biscayne Bay is so near and bright that you can almost imagine you’re at the wheel of a boat instead of a car. The mainland greets the highway with a crowded comb of skyscrapers, a fine and sharp introduction to the city of Miami.
Perhaps the most remarkable sight, though, is of the three pill-shaped islands just north of the causeway. Dredged to life in the 1920s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, these tiny isles boast some of America’s most extravagant houses. On Star Island, the westernmost of the three, a vacant lot sold for $10 million this summer. Homes command two to three times that much; neighbors include Sean Combs and Rosie O’Donnell.
What’s unusual about Star Island, though, isn’t the concentration of luxury, but its proximity to a busy highway. The alabaster colonnades and turquoise pools are there for the gawking, just 200 yards across the bay.
It’s rare to come face to face with such heights of personal wealth in this country. The grandest homes are squired away, Biltmore-style, on large estates. The next class of mansions hides behind walls, gates or dense horticulture. Most wealthy Americans simply live in the suburbs, in the subtle but no less certain privacy of the periphery.
This is a relative peculiarity of the American city, whose gradual abandonment by the rich has little equivalent elsewhere in the world. By the late 20th century, cities like Cincinnati and Memphis had been abandoned by their downtown residential elite (and much of the middle class, too). In younger cities, like Phoenix and Houston, the rich never lived downtown to begin with. The economic historian Richard F. Muth has estimated that median income in American cities rises by 8 percent for every mile one moves away from downtown. Ten miles out, it has doubled.
This donut effect gives the American city a unique psychic aura: Poverty is more visible than wealth. When Jacob Riis wrote, a century ago, that one half of the world didn’t know how the other half lived, he meant the rich didn’t know much about the poor.
Today, that statement could easily be inverted. For decades, the deteriorating brick hulks of public housing projects have broadcast the despair of inner-city poverty to suburban commuters. But the top end of the country’s wealth spectrum has grown more and more obscure.
Of course, Americans have for years tuned their televisions to shows like Cribs, Real Housewives, Keeping up with the Kardashians, and the rest. But those programs portray wealth as spectacle, as a kind of surreal fiction.
