For too many Americans, upward mobility—for themselves and for their children—is a dream denied. And as inequality continues to increase, most Americans do not feel in control of their own economic futures. Real and sustainable mobility requires more than economic success. It also requires that people can exercise power over the circumstances of their lives and experience the dignity of being valued for their contributions.

Why this matters

Changemakers across the US envision a future where America enables and uplifts the economic well-being, power, and dignity of all people, especially those historically excluded from prosperity. Achieving progress toward that vision requires that people can rely on five essential and interconnected pillars of support:

• rewarding work
• high-quality education
• opportunity-rich and inclusive neighborhoods
• healthy environments and access to good health care
• responsive and just governance

The Urban Institute’s Mobility Metrics provide a starting point for understanding how well these interlocking pillars of support are performing at the national, county, and city levels. In this report, we provide a national snapshot of the conditions essential to people’s economic success, power, and dignity.

What we found

In many communities, essential pillars of support fall short of what is needed to enable and uplift residents’ upward mobility, especially for people of color.

• The pillars of support people need to enable their economic success, power, and dignity vary widely across the US, with the average experience often falling substantially below the strongest experiences. No county provides consistently strong support across all five essential pillars.
• The nation’s long-standing history of racial discrimination and segregation has built inequities into the performance of essential local systems, disadvantaging people of color. In the average experience, people of color experience high levels of poverty concentration and school poverty, face significant income and wealth disadvantages, and are more likely than White people to experience homelessness.
• In most counties, local labor markets and housing markets are out of balance, creating insecurity and hardship for many households.

Drawing on these insights, local policymakers, practitioners, and advocates can use Urban’s Upward Mobility Framework and the Mobility Metrics to catalyze and inform action to strengthen their communities’ opportunities for upward mobility by comparing their community’s performance with national trends, exploring inequities, assessing interconnections across policy domains, and setting targets and monitoring progress in mobility over time.

How we did it

To produce the national values, we calculated population-weighted median values that reflect the local conditions the average American experiences. For each metric, we sorted all counties in the nation based on their metric value and weighted each county’s value by that county’s population. The value that falls in the middle is the national median.