Two communities that are worlds apart

With their different economic pictures, Sherborn and Springfield illustrate the growing financial inequality in Massachusetts

December 18, 2011|By Megan Woolhouse, Globe Staff

SHERBORN - Rolling hills, orchards, and horse farms dominate the towns… (Bill Greene/Globe Staff )

S herborn, the state’s wealthiest community, is a bucolic enclave of sweeping estates and horse farms nestled amid Boston’s most prosperous suburbs.

Nearly two hours west sits Springfield, a city with a hollowed-out economy, hungry for jobs, and home to some of the state’s highest levels of poverty.

With their opposite economic destinies, they are rarely confused, but together they embody the forces that are widening the income gap in Massachusetts, a divide that has increasingly separated rich and poor, east and west in the state. Over the past 30 years, Sherborn’s median household income, adjusted for inflation, has increased more than 40 percent to nearly $190,000, while the median income in Springfield has dropped 16 percent to about $40,000 a year, according the University of Massachusetts’ Donahue Institute.

This is the story of two communities and the circumstances that have shaped their starkly different economic fortunes. One is a bedroom community of single-family homes and two-parent families, with high levels of education and jobs in the state’s technology, life sciences, and financial services sectors. The other is a place where good-paying manufacturing jobs are a memory, replaced by low-paying service jobs, or no jobs at all, where college degrees are rare, and most families are headed by single parents.

“You’re talking about people in the same state, but it looks like different worlds to me,’’ said Andrew Sum, director of Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies and author of “Recapturing the American Dream,’’ an analysis of the Massachusetts economy over the past three decades. “This is not the way our state used to be - back in 1979, we were among the national leaders in income equality. Now, we’re a national leader in inequality.’’

Indeed, Massachusetts lost significant ground. In 1979, the median income of the wealthiest families, the top 1 percent, was 11 times the income of the bottom 10 percent, and 4 times that of families in the middle, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies. By 2009, the size of the gap between the richest and poorest more than doubled, to 24 times, and nearly doubled between the top and middle, to 7 times. Another measure of income distribution, known as the GINI index, also shows increasing concentration of wealth in Massachusetts. In 1979, Massachusetts had less household income inequality than the nation as a whole, ranking 24th among states, according to the index. Today, inequality in Massachusetts exceeds the national average, and the state has the fifth-highest concentration of wealth in the nation.