For an upper-middle class household in Latin America, residing in an apartment tower  with good access to jobs and amenities seems like a natural choice. In cities with high levels of congestion, low decentralization of jobs, highly concentrated amenities, and few transport alternatives, vertical neighborhoods appear as a suitable solution to satisfy the  growing demands for access of the more affluent.  In fact, many well-to-do neighborhoods in Latin American cities are also vertical neighborhoods.

In recent work on income segregation in Brazilian cities, published in the OECD report Divided Cities: Understanding Intra-Urban Inequalities, I explore whether verticalization bears any relationship with the high observed levels of segregation of the affluent. Preliminary visual evidence for some cities, including Rio de Janeiro, clearly points to a correlation between the percentage of affluent people and the percentage of people residing in apartment towers across neighborhoods.

To test the relationship between concentration in vertical neighborhoods…