In September 2017, the Census Bureau announced good news for the American middle class, courtesy of its Current Population Survey (CPS)

Real median household income—that is, the income earned by a household squarely in the middle of the U.S. income distribution, adjusted for inflation—rose by 3.2 percent, the second consecutive year in which the measure increased.

As many observed, however, that impressive income growth merely pushed median household income just past its level from 1999.

Over the past 17 years, incomes fell during the recession of the early 2000s, rebounded slowly, dipped dramatically during the Great Recession, and then stalled before finally growing again in 2015 and 2016.

But that national middle-class income trend does not hold uniformly around the country.

The hardest-hit urban areas highlight the important role that manufacturing decline played in long-term income decline. For the typical urban area in that category, the share of workers employed in manufacturing (as reported by the Census Bureau) dropped 5.3 percentage points from 2000 to 2016, well above the average of 3.9 percent for all urban areas.

Read the full article on middle-class incomes by Alan Berube at Brookings