ABSTRACT
For the almost 2,500 years since Plato wrote that “any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich,” urban scholars have been struck by the remarkable amount of income inequality within dense cities (Wheeler 2005). While there is certainly plenty of rural inequality as well, the density of cities makes the contrast of rich and poor particularly striking. Indeed, there is a 44 percent correlation between inequality and density across those U.S. counties with more than one person per every two acres.1
