More than 19 percent of people in American central cities are poor. In suburbs, just 7.5 percent of people live in poverty. The income elasticity of demand for land is too low for urban poverty to come from wealthy individuals' wanting to live where land is cheap (the traditional explanation of...

Population density varies widely across US cities. A simple, static general equilibrium model suggests that moderate-sized differences in cities' total factor productivity can account for such variation. Nevertheless, the productivity required to sustain above-average population densities...