Roanoke Alabama Has One Of The Worst Income Gaps In America

By Nathan Young on November 10, 2014

Well, the bad news just continues on for East Alabama. And since I am having one of my worst days in a long time, let’s just bash East Alabama more, shall we? Business Insider recently ranked the cities in America who has the biggest income gap between the wealthy and the poor. The website used Census Bureau data from their 2008-2012 American Community Survey to estimate various measures of income inequality.

The website also used the Gini Index, which uses a number between 0 and 1 and indicates how far an area’s income distribution is from a completely flat distribution. No surprise, the 50 cities in America with the biggest gap between the wealthy and the poor are mostly college towns or towns who have a lot of millionaires living in them. But, some towns are also listed because their economy has imploded. Here are the 20 cities in America with the worst income gap. The town in Alabama listed below is Roanoke, which is not much of a surprise.

The 20 above contain a couple of college towns, so Business Insider took the college towns out of the list, and it moved Roanoke to being the 10th city in America with the highest income gap.

So, what can we learn from this. Sure, some cities on the list like Vail, Palm Beach, and Beverly Hills contains some people who has a lot of money(millionaires), and some people who are in the middle class. And in these towns, the cost of living is through the roof. So you should expect to see them on the list. For other towns like Roanoke, it paints an entirely different picture. A picture where the economy in Roanoke, and the rest of East Alabama, is one of the worst in America. Hey, I have been talking about for a while now, you should check out this presentation and infographic below.

To sum it up differently, people in Roanoke, and the rest of East Alabama, are leaving for different parts of the country. The reason, people can not find anything! I know of one person who used to live in Roanoke, but moved to Texas and found a good paying job, quickly. So, will the people in East Alabama get smart, and bring in people who know how to attract jobs, or will they continue to suffer? We will see!

Read the Business Insider article at: http://www.businessinsider.com/most-unequal-town-in-every-state-map-2014-11