"Only the 1 percent here," she adds, "feel economically secure."
In other words, inequality has local officials coming and going. The ranks of the homeless are growing because almost all the gains from America's growing economy, as the Economic Policy Institute's Elise Gould testified to Congress this past March, are "going to households at the top."
Empathy for the plight of the homeless, meanwhile, is withering away, particularly among society's most fortunate, as the social distance between that top and the rest of society widens. The rich have climbed so far up the income ladder that they can't see the humanity on the faces of people stuck on the lower rungs.
One telling sign of our unequal times: In wealthy Bay Area neighborhoods, the Washington Post reports, GoFundMe campaigns have emerged "to finance lawsuits against affordable housing proposals."
What happens when empathy all but totally disappears? You get the life that the 33-year-old Ashana Cunningham lives in southwest Connecticut, the home to some of America's grandest hedge-fund fortunes as well as more separate and unequal housing, a devastating just-published analysis notes, "than nearly everywhere else in the country."
Cunningham, the mother of three, lives in a homeless shelter amid abandoned factories and rundown houses. She takes a long bus commute every day to a high-priced day care center in one of Connecticut's poshest areas. Cunningham couldn't afford to live in that area even if she made triple her $12.50 per hour salary because, as joint reporting by Pro Publica and the Connecticut Mirror details, Connecticut's wealthiest communities have been blocking construction of any modestly priced housing "within their borders for the last two decades, often through exclusionary zoning requirements."
Towns like Westport median home value: $1.15 million have surrounded themselves "with invisible walls to block affordable housing and, by extension, the people who need it."
One local developer five years ago proposed a project for Westport that would accommodate up to 12 families via a mix of single- and multifamily housing units on a 2.2-acre property he had purchased. The density, the developer explains, would allow the units to sell "for less than the typical Westport home."
The Westport Planning and Zoning Commission denied his plan.
"To me," declared one commissioner who voted against the plan, "this is ghettoizing Westport."
In reality, the wealthy in localities like Westport have effectively "ghettoized" their corner of Connecticut, locking in place an extreme inequality that's doing deep damage to the young people who grow up within it. So suggests a study that appeared last month in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics.
The researchers involved in the study examined data from nearly 30,000 schools and found "the first evidence of an association between early-life inequality and adolescent bullying."
"Put another way," explains an analysis of the study from Harvard's Shorenstein Center, "there is a link between early life inequality and being bullied at school later in life."
The new study's lead author, Frank Elgar of Montreal's McGill University, emphasizes that the link his team's researchers found rests between inequality and bullying, not poverty and bullying. The "effect of growing up in an unequal setting," Elgar points out, may well be significantly and negatively altering the course of children's development.
Just how does inequality have this impact? The researchers say we need more research. How about they start that probing in southwest Connecticut.
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