Here’s the latest data on median household income from the Census Bureau, courtesy of the Commonwealth Institute. Nothing much new here: Residents of the Washington Metropolitan Statistical Area make 50% or more than inhabitants of Virginia’s other metros, more than $90,000, just like they always have.
There is a well-defined second tier: Hampton Roads (Virginia Beach-Norfolk), Richmond, Charlottesville and Winchester. I haven’t looked into it, but my porky sense tells me (if you don’t get the feeble joke, porky sense is Bacon’s analogy to spidey sense) that Charlottesville is on the rise. All those horse country gentry and handsomely paid University of Virginia administrators may be pulling up median incomes.
The smaller metros — Roanoke, Lynchburg, Harrisonburg, Blacksburg, Staunton/Waynesboro — constitute a third income tier. And then there’s non-metro Virginia, which is not included in this chart, which I expect constitutes a fourth tier.
Overall, Virginians’ median income rose 1.8% last year. While incomes in the Old Dominion are relatively high — $68,100 statewide compared to the national median of $57,600 — the growth in income lagged the national average of 2.4%. Sequestration still haunts the commonwealth. Incomes in the Washington metro, only 1.5%, dragged down the state average. Once the highest-income metro in the United States, Washington now lags San Jose and San Francisco.
As an aside… the Commonwealth Institute notes that “communities of color” — African-Americans and Hispanics — tend to have much lower incomes on average, citing “structural barriers” such as poor schools, housing discrimination and employment discrimination. Given the fact that it was citing Census data on household income, the think tank appears to have missed an excellent opportunity to examine the contribution of household size and structure on income levels.
One of the biggest contributors to household income is the number of bread winners in the household. If African-American and Hispanic households are more likely than communities of pallor to consist of single-income households — as, in fact, they are — the breakdown of the family contributes in a direct and measurable way to reduced median household income.
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