Chicago’s “Disappearing Middle Class” Can Be Found in Its Proliferating Upper Middle-Class NeighborhoodsChicago’s “Disappearing Middle Class” Can Be Found in Its Proliferating Upper Middle-Class Neighborhoods

Chicago’s middle class isn’t disappearing; it’s much better than that.

In a recent report with Stephen Rose, I argued that the narrative of a “shrinking middle class” was based on a kernel of truth, but one that undermines economic pessimism. We showed that while 36 percent of families were part of what we called the “core middle class” in 1979, the share had fallen to 31 percent by 2024. However, the share of families who fell short of the middle class shrank even more. The middle class has not been hollowed out; rather, the overall decline stems from the net movement of families upward into the upper-middle class. That group, with incomes between 5 and 15 times the 2024 federal poverty guidelines, rose from 10 percent of families in 1979 to 31 percent in 2024.  

Analyses that find a hollowed-out middle invariably rely on definitions of the middle class that peg thresholds to how the typical family is doing. In that case, even if everyone is better off over time in inflation-adjusted terms, if the middle’s gains are stronger than those of families lower down, more people can fall short of “the middle.” The Pew Research Center, for example, found that the share of families that were “lower-income” rose between 1971 and 2023, even though the purchasing power of those lower-income families rose by 55 percent. The explanation for this seeming paradox is that “middle-income” families saw a 60 percent gain, making it harder to reach the middle-income threshold if income rose more slowly than that.  

The point of my paper with Rose was that claims of a “hollowing out” of the middle class wrongly reinterpret widespread gains across the income distribution as rising insecurity and declining living standards. Unbeknownst to us, a perfect example of this misinterpretation appeared a week before we published our report in Chicago magazine. The offending article title blared that “Chicago’s Middle Class Is Disappearing.” My reanalysis of the data behind the piece indicates it would be difficult to articulate a more misleading conclusion. Fewer Chicagoans live in middle-class neighborhoods than in 1970—but only because more live in richer neighborhoods.

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