You don’t have to look hard to find inequality in America. For the past several weeks I have been sheltering with my family in Central New York, where even among the rolling hills and sweeping expanses of farmland, the vast divide between the haves and have-nots is as plainly visible as it is in New York City.

Tompkins County, one of the wealthiest in the region, is home to Cornell University and the stunningly beautiful Cayuga Heights village, with stone and Tudor mansions set on the cliffs among gorges and waterfalls overlooking Ithaca. Seen from the bluffs above Ithaca Falls, tightly packed two-story homes downtown give way to commercial streets and strip malls. Behind a Walmart, in a swampy forest of city land known as “The Jungle,” more than 30 makeshift shelters form a sprawling homeless encampment. Volunteers with Loaves and Fishes, one of the longest-serving food pantries in the city, walk winding paths through tick-infested marshes that are strewn with garbage, broken bicycles and hypodermic needles. Among their clients is 27-year-old Cameron Alexander McCaffery, who just spent his first upstate winter in a one-room shack made from scraps of building materials.

Farther north, in Syracuse, Interstate 81 bisects the city with a huge four-lane overpass. Beneath it, on both sides of a highway, are long rows of two-story brick apartment buildings called the Pioneer Homes. They are the oldest public housing projects in New York and are among the first in the nation. On the east side of the highway, residents navigate a strip of sooty industrial wasteland to reach a few small convenience stores, the only businesses within walking distance. As the sun sets over the city’s impoverished south side, long-haul trucks barreling through the city cast shadows across the buildings, speeding past doors and windows, and shaking the ground beneath. On a hill above, the modern glass-and-steel buildings of the Upstate and Syracuse University campuses sparkle in the evening light. During the school year, Syracuse’s vaunted journalism program sends its eager young journalists, some of whom pay upward of $65,000 a year in tuition, down the hill to document the blight.