Regional Financing Alternatives for Mass Transit. Volume V: Construction of Metropolitan Income Distribution for Atlanta and New York City

摘要

The main focus of this study is on regional or metropolitan-wide taxation to subsidize mass transit. This report, the fifth and final volume of the final report, is essentially a technical appendix to the body of the final report; however, it does provide considerable detail on a procedure capable of combining and reconciling several sets of existing income data and distribution data so as to generate a more comprehensive definition of metropolitan area income than is currently available in any single published source. This volume describes the procedures used to estimate income distribution for the Atlanta, Georgia, and the New York City regions. The estimating procedures involve six steps: (1) aggregation of census income data from six sources into four sources that are comparable among the data sets used in this procedure; (2) distribution of income from these four sources across income classes; (3) use of an iterative technique to insure that these income imputations conform to the reported or estimated source and class totals for each area; (4) correction of census income distribution estimates for underreporting and for the exclusion of certain forms of earned income; (5) addition of capital gains income to census income; and (6) inclusion of the imputed value of owner-occupied housing. The operations stated may be employed to construct income distributions for the entire SMSA, for a central city, for the outside central city areas of the metropolitan area, and for other large individual jurisdictions within the SMSA.