Abstract:
Charlotte ranks among the worst large U.S. metros for intergenerational income mobility, but whether wealth mobility differs across the surrounding region has been unknown. I apply the public-use county estimates of Binder, Risch, and Voorheis (2026), which measure income and wealth mobility on a common national footing, to the 14-county Charlotte region, including, for the first time, its three South Carolina counties. I introduce the wealth-income persistence gap (𝛽gap), the difference between a county's housing-wealth and total-income rank-rank persistence, and map it against national percentile ranks. The gap is positive in six of the fourteen counties and largest in and around Mecklenburg, though it does not fall cleanly along urban-rural lines; homeownership is the weakest upward-mobility dimension across nearly the entire region; and county rankings shift markedly depending on which concept is measured. The wealth lens thus reveals a mobility problem that income benchmarks miss. The analysis is descriptive and motivates a cross-county causal research agenda.
