NY Times: The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up: How Your Area Compares (interactive)

[Springfield]

For an information junkie like myself, I find this very interesting...

Location matters – enormously. If you’re poor and live in the Washington, D.C., area, it’s better to be in Fairfax City than in Washington or Prince William County. Not only that, the younger you are when you move to Fairfax City, the better you will do on average. Children who move at earlier ages are less likely to become single parents, more likely to go to college and more likely to earn more.

Every year a poor child spends in Fairfax City adds about $260 to his or her annual household income at age 26, compared with a childhood spent in the average American county. Over the course of a full childhood, which is up to age 20 for the purposes of this analysis, the difference adds up to about $5,200, or 20 percent, more in average income as a young adult.

These findings, particularly those that show how much each additional year matters, are from a new study by Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren that has huge consequences on how we think about poverty and mobility in the United States. The pair, economists at Harvard, have long been known for their work on income mobility, but the latest findings go further. Now, the researchers are no longer confined to talking about which counties merely correlate well with income mobility; new data suggests some places actually cause it.

More at the link, along with an interactive article.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/03/upshot/the-best-and-worst-places-to-grow-up-how-your-area-compares.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=pay&smvar=mapkwp&kwp_0=15796&kwp_4=101412&kwp_1=141918&abt=0002&abg=1&_r=0