Of course the change is somewhat (only somewhat) accentuated because there are changes in the composition of the population of the City during this time period. First, there are more affluent young people staying in the NYC boundaries. Second, there has been a significant influx of low wage "new immigrant" groups employed at the lowest end of the wage scale. At the same time their numbers have been partly matched by departures for the poorer suburbs by those who did benefit a bit in the last 20 years: the upper end of some minority groups and what was left of the "white ethnics".
For example, in the Latino community the number of those from Puerto Rican background may have actually dropped as they have ever so slowly moved up a small notch over 2 decades and some have moved out to the less well off suburbs (the old working class towns of NJ, and south-central LI). They have been replaced by Dominicans, Ecuadorians, Central Americans and Mexicans especially from Guerrero and Peubla (a new group in NYC). These groups are clearly lower wage than their predecessors in the same physical neighborhoods.
Again though: I think if one took the NYC region as a whole the trend would still be towards polarization, just less dramatic.
Paul
>>Heather Boushey made an assertion I found stunning ....
>.....The real
>wage of the bottom half of NYC workers fell by about 20% between the
>late 1980s and the late 1990s. Only the top 10% was up - and that by
>just 2%. Heather didn't say this, but the real winners were the top
>1-2%, who don't really show up in the Census/BLS Current Population
>Survey, which is what she based these stats on. She also reported
>that the share of the NYC workforce earning less than $10.73 an hour
>(in 1999 dollars) rose from 30% in the late 1980s to 42% in the late
>1990s.
>
>Doug