The 18 Most Unequal Cities In America

But American cities have varying levels of inequality.

The Census Bureau makes annual estimates of a standard measure of inequality for US metropolitan areas. The Gini index is a measure, ranging between 0 and 1, of inequality. The Gini index measures how much the distribution of income or wealth in an area differs from a completely equal distribution. A Gini index of 0 indicates that everyone has the same income; an index of 1 means one person has all the money and everyone else has nothing.

We ranked 382 metropolitan areas with populations of at least 65,000 using Census estimates from the 2013 American Community Survey, and found the 18 areas with the highest Gini indices. We also included the income shares of the ends of the distribution: the top 5% and the bottom 20%, also from the Census Bureau.