Median income in American cities tends to rise at about 8 percent per mile as one moves away from the business district.

My mental model of the world was pretty typical for an American child brought up in a single-family home. It’s easy to see why—US residential development is dominated by suburbs, and home ownership is touted as the ultimate symbol of prosperity. Other types of dwellings tend to be for young people starting out in life or low income households unable to afford a place of their own. The popular image of the American Dream includes a white picket fence and a car, not an apartment and a subway pass.

This is in stark contrast with most other countries. The French word for suburb is banlieue, and it has come to connote poverty and social isolation, because that is where immigrants and the poor tend to live. They’ve been known as “red suburbs” because of their tendency to vote Communist. Meanwhile, the wealthy live in the city center. In South Africa, the inner city is reserved for the privileged white class, while black citizens have a hour-long journey to work.* Kenneth Jackson wrote of Amsterdam that “affluence characterizes the old center … but the working class has increasingly been forced outward to the suburbs”. He continues:

“In Brazil the exclusion of slum dwellers from the urban cores is so deeply rooted in the culture that the Portuguese word to describe them is marginais, and the word used to describe their arrival is invasaõ.”

Homeownership rates are lower in most of the world too, even for developed countries of comparable prosperity. Two-thirds of American families own a home. Meanwhile, the rate in Sweden, a wealthy nation, is just one third, and that rate has remained stable in the period of unprecedented prosperity the country has seen since 1945. The US rate is also double that of Germany, Switzerland, France, Great Britain, and Norway.