Consider the fortunes of janitors and lawyers, Ganong and Shoag write. Janitors and lawyers have long made more money working in New York than in the Deep South. As a result, many migrated from the Deep South to New York. But as housing costs in New York rose, the benefits of migration crumbled, at least for the janitors. The lawyers still came out ahead, but the janitors saw housing consume more than 50 percent of their paychecks.29 It used to be that both high-wage and low-wage workers moved from poorer areas to richer ones. By the 1990s, poorer workers were moving away from high-income
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