The National Fabric

A MoneyClimate is the ground, not the household standing on it. Every ZIP code in the country gets exactly one, whether it wants one or not.

• C1

  Three-Car Contentment

  Detached, owned, low-poverty and structurally dependent on a driveway. The local economy runs on square footage and a commute nobody brings up.

• C2

  Dynastic Drift

  Old, wealthy and quietly compounding. Income arrives partly from work and increasingly from decisions made before the residents were born.

• C3

  Fresh Drywall Money

  Credentialed households in housing that did not exist in 2010. The median resident and the median building are both approximately new.

• C4

  Elevator People

  Dense, attached, transit-served and conspicuously short of children. The household is small. The rent is not.

• C5

  Shift-Work Metropolitan

  Wages, transit and density without the degrees or the tax base. The city runs on this climate and reprices it annually.

• C6

  Gravel and Gasoline

  Rural, spread out, owned outright and reachable only by vehicle. Distance is the largest line item in the household budget.

• C7

  The Long-Commute Discount

  Cheap housing bought at the price of driving to it. The mortgage is affordable and the odometer is not.

• C8

  Priced For A Reason

  Inexpensive housing, thin earnings and a tax base that stopped growing some time ago. The discount is real, and so is what produced it.

• CX

  Room and Board

  Areas where the population is housed by an institution rather than in households — dormitories, barracks, correctional facilities. Income, tenure and home value are not reported here, because there are no households to report them for.