Paul Krugman: Stranded by Sprawl

Detroit is a symbol of the old economy’s decline. It’s not just the derelict center; the metropolitan
area as a whole lost population between 2000 and 2010, the worst performance among major
cities. Atlanta, by contrast, epitomizes the rise of the Sun Belt; it gained more than a million people
over the same period, roughly matching the performance of Dallas and Houston without the extra
boost from oil.

Yet in one important respect booming Atlanta looks just like Detroit gone bust: both are places
where the American dream seems to be dying, where the children of the poor have great difficulty
climbing the economic ladder. In fact, upward social mobility — the extent to which children
manage to achieve a higher socioeconomic status than their parents — is even lower in Atlanta
than it is in Detroit. And it’s far lower in both cities than it is in, say, Boston or San Francisco, even
though these cities have much slower growth than Atlanta.