Ask Us Your Questions About Inequality in California

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“The gap between the rich and poor in California has grown,” the document says, “despite the state’s remarkable economic expansion.”

It goes on to paint a troubling portrait of a state in which highly educated workers rebounded strongly from an economic downturn, but lower wage earners hadn’t caught up.

And while that trend was playing out across the country, a variety of factors made that inequality more acute in the Golden State.

“Californians appear to be profoundly aware of income inequality and its relative seriousness in California compared with the nation as a whole,” it found.

Here’s the twist, though: That report came out in 1999.

It was released by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonprofit organization that has continued to track economic inequality in the state.

[Read more about what Californians today think about the housing crisis and wildfires.]

When I asked Sarah Bohn, the institute’s director of research, about the gap between the state’s rich and poor today, she said things haven’t gotten much better.

“California’s gap is a little bit bigger than the rest of the country,” Ms. Bohn said. “I think the underlying drivers are the same — they’re just more extreme here.”

The California economy is going strong. Unemployment is at its lowest point in decades and nine years of job growth through 2018 amounted to one of the longest expansions in recent history, according to data released this year.

And yet, poverty rates adjusted for costs of living remain stubbornly high in California, despite the fact that most poor families in California are working.

And even though incomes have steadily risen in recent years, the gaps between top earners and median earners and lower income workers have widened: While the state’s median family income increased by about 22 percent from 1980 to 2017, top-income families earned 50 to 60 percent more in 2017 than in 1980.

Ms. Bohn attributed much of that widening inequality to a trend that is playing out across the globe. The value of a college education is rising as demand for highly skilled workers — many in tech fields — grows. On the flip side, lower skilled work has become less valuable as automation shifts the kinds of jobs that are available.

Californians — more so than those in many other places in the U.S. — must set aside too much of whatever income they make just to stay in their homes, which means that income inequality is much more prominent in our daily lives.

But we know that the struggle to afford housing and shifts in the work force are just a couple of ways that inequality affects how Californians live.

We need your help to find more.

Times reporters are taking a deeper look at the issues driving inequality in California, and we want to know what questions you’d ask if you were assigning our stories. What have you always wondered about inequality in communities across California and the factors that contribute to it?

Using this form, tell us what you’re wondering about and what questions you want our reporters to dig into. Our reporters will comb through your queries and choose a selection to pursue. If you’re up for it, they may even bring you along during the reporting process, drawing on your experiences and expertise.

We’ll keep you posted as we go.

Click here to open the form.

Here’s what else we’re following

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My colleague Alex Williams recently spent some time with the rock star Kim Gordon for this profile of her new old life in Los Angeles. They got tacos at her favorite spot. And he wrote this about that experience:

Face it: You assumed Kim Gordon was from New York.

Her old band, Sonic Youth, was the most New York band imaginable for three decades running, and it was in New York that Ms. Gordon became the punk rock, feminist and fashion “icon” that she is now generally understood to be. (Though she’s not a fan of the word.)

Except this living epitome of downtown Manhattan cool actually grew up in Los Angeles, and she quietly moved back to her native city a few years ago after the breakup of her marriage, and band.

During a four-hour interview on a sweltering August afternoon, Ms. Gordon, 66, took me to Restaurante Tierra Caliente in Mt. Washington for what she said are the best mole tacos in Los Angeles.

I left convinced.

Since indoor seating is limited at the tiny establishment, we grabbed a couple of Pacificos at a nearby store and poured them surreptitiously in Styrofoam cups at an outdoor table.

The place gets a lot of buzz on Yelp for its chilaquiles, but the mole was why we were there. I found it rich, complex, bursting with notes of chocolate — but in a not-too-chocolaty way.

I’d give you a better description, but I’m no Jonathan Gold. And unlike Kim Gordon, I’m still a New Yorker.

California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: [email protected]. Were you forwarded this email? Sign up for California Today here.

Jill Cowan grew up in Orange County, graduated from U.C. Berkeley and has reported all over the state, including the Bay Area, Bakersfield and Los Angeles — but she always wants to see more. Follow along here or on Twitter, @jillcowan.

California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.