(Bloomberg News) Growing up in poverty on the streets of Bridgeport, Connecticut, Carlos Gonzalez sold heroin and crack cocaine and eventually landed in jail. Now he cleans the kitchens of Greenwich private schools and of financial companies UBS AG and Royal Bank of Scotland in Stamford.
"It's hard to see the wealth -- it feels so out of reach," said Gonzalez, 42, who lives less than a mile from the now-demolished public housing project where his grandmother raised him in Connecticut's largest and fourth-poorest city. "I will never have that. So I just pray to God every day to give me the strength to go to work and do the right thing."
Nowhere is the contrast between rich and poor clearer than in the metropolitan region abutting New York, stretching from Greenwich on the west to Bridgeport on the east. This 625- square-mile swath, where subsidized housing complexes sit blocks from multimillion-dollar mansions, is home to the widest income gap of any metro area in the U.S., according to Census Bureau data compiled by Bloomberg. If this region were a country, it would be the 14th-most unequal spot on the planet, ranking just below Brazil, based on figures in the CIA World Factbook.
Economic inequality sparked the Occupy Wall Street movement and is shaping the 2012 presidential campaign. Calling it "the defining issue of our time," President Barack Obama told an audience in Kansas last week that income disparity can drag down the economy. Obama, whose re-election chances are challenged by weak job growth, said millions of Americans feel "the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded."
Stagnating wages of working Americans and lower tax rates for top earners have contributed to broadening the gap between rich and poor, said A. Fiona Pearson, who teaches sociology at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain. So, too, has the economy's shift from manufacturing to services and the growing importance of educational attainment, she said.
Connecticut's per capita income is the highest of any state in the nation at $36,775, according to the census. In the Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk metro area, 53,076 households took home at least $200,000 -- and 16,505 earned less than $10,000.
"This region is a microcosm of the U.S.," Pearson said.
Exacerbating the gap are the ranks of wealthy residents who have grown richer as the region became a hub for investment firms and hedge funds, she said. Median household income hovers 60 percent above the national figure at about $80,000.
Income disparity in the U.S. has expanded among working-age people since 1980, in total by 25 percent, according to a report this month from the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The average income of the top 10 percent in 2008 was $114,000, almost 15 times higher than that of the bottom 10 percent's $7,800. That's up from 10 to 1 in the mid-1980s.
Lin Lavery, 63, moved to Greenwich 28 years ago. She lives with her husband, who works in finance, on a tree-lined street with private trash pickup about a 10-minute drive from the Greenwich Country Day School, where kindergarten tuition costs $29,700 plus a $3,500 enrollment fee.