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State of Metropolitan America,” concluded that during the past decade, the gaps in both income and education between America’s top metro regions and those at the bottom had widened. “Gains in the ‘war for talent’ among U.S. metro areas are accruing disproportionately to already better-educated places,” it said.
    According to a preliminary examination of census data by the urban analyst Aaron Renn,roughly as many college graduates moved to Manhattan in the aughts as there are residents of Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 2009, every one of the ten U.S. counties with the most growth in college graduates per square mile were in or around New York City, San Francisco, Boston, or Washington, DC. In most of these counties, the inflow of college graduates and people with graduate degrees was substantially higher than the counties’ total population growth: people with less education were on their way out.
    Powerful economic forces have driven the country’s best-educated and most-skilled people toward one another. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Lucas argued that economic growth is propelled, first and foremost, by spillovers in knowledge resulting from the clustering of people rich in human capital. Physical proximity, and the constant networking it allows, enables smart, talented people to generate ideas faster, hone them more sharply, and turn them into products or services more quickly than they otherwise could. From 1975 through 2001, patent production in San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Austin, and Portland, Oregon, grew by more than three times the national average, and skilled workers in these and other highly educated cities saw their incomes rise rapidly. Inthe 1990s, the ten metro areas with the most-educated residents saw personal incomes grow at nearly double the pace of the ten least-educated metro areas. Increasingly, in order to realize their full economic value, well-educated workers have needed to live in one of a handful of places. At the same time, because
routine
work can now be done from anywhere (or by machines), the physical presence of a nonprofessional middle class in these cities has become far less important to the growth and sustainability of their economies.
    As high-income, high-potential workers have flooded dynamic cities and regions—dubbed “superstar cities” by the economist Joseph Gyourko—they have bid up housing prices and other costs, driving out the middle and lower classes. Some high-school graduates, and even college graduates from nonselective schools, have settled in the sprawling exurbs of these regions. Before the crash, more still had lit out for the suburbs of low-cost, fast-growing Sun Belt cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Orlando. Meanwhile, Rust Belt cities like Buffalo and Youngstown, Ohio, have been slowly drained of their most talented young people, who’ve left for greener pastures.
    The housing bust has revealed that many of these new middle-class magnets may have more in common with the cities of the Rust Belt than with city-regions like Boston or Austin or Minneapolis. Housing was the source of their growth, and also their primary product. With the construction boom over, many former boomtowns have few large, highly productive industries to sustain them, and a comparatively narrow base of human capital.In a Brookings Institution ranking of one hundred major American metro areas by the prevalence of college graduates in 2009, Phoenix ranked 66th, sandwiched between Akron and Cleveland. Tampa, Cape Coral, and Las Vegas were 84th, 85th, and 91st, respectively, in and among places like Dayton, Memphis, and Toledo. Little wonder, then, that some of the highest and most persistent unemployment rates in the country are to be found in these former boomtowns, along with long-struggling Rust Belt cities like Detroit. And little wonder that themost highly educated cities are showing signs of resiliency, despite experiencing much shallower losses in jobs and