Q: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - American middle-class neighborhoods are on the decline and the divide between the rich and poor is widening, according to a study on Wednesday. 
  
 The share of families living in middle-income neighborhoods has dropped to 44 percent in 2007 from 65 percent in 1970, the Stanford University study showed. 
  
 The study sponsored by the Sage Foundation and Brown University covered the country's major 117 metropolitan areas. 
  
 It supports views that the income inequality gap is widening and could put the distribution of public resources under the spotlight. 
  
 "Given that in 2008 the top 10 percent of earners controlled approximately 48 percent of all income in the United States, the increasing isolation of the affluent from the low and moderate-income families means that a significant portion of society's resources are concentrated in a smaller and smaller portion of neighborhoods," the study said. 
  
 The study found that the proportion of families living in affluent neighborhoods doubled to 14 percent in 2007 from 7 percent in 1970. 
  
 During the same period, the share of families in poor residential areas increased to 17 percent from 8 percent. 
  
 While the study did not examine the impact of the 2007-09 recession on residential patterns, there is little doubt that the proportion of families residing in middle-class areas has dropped even further. 
  
 This segment of the population has been hardest hit by the recession, which claimed more than 8 million jobs, most of them in manufacturing and construction. 
  
 "The enormous number of housing foreclosures in the last few years has likely led many low-income families to move to lower-income neighborhoods, which would lead to increased income segregation," the study said. 
  
 "Conversely, declining incomes and income volatility among the middle-class may lead to lowered income segregation, because it may widen the income distribution within previously middle-income neighborhoods, or force these families to move into lower-income neighborhoods." 
  
 (Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Andrew Hay) ||||| Much of the shift is the result of changing income structure in the United States. Part of the country’s middle class has slipped to the lower rungs of the income ladder as manufacturing and other middle-class jobs have dwindled, while the wealthy receive a bigger portion of the income pie. Put simply, there are fewer people in the middle. 
  
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 But the shift is more than just changes in income. The study also found that there is more residential sorting by income, with the rich flocking together in new exurbs and gentrifying pockets where lower- and middle-income families cannot afford to live. 
  
 The study — part of US2010, a research project financed by Russell Sage and Brown University — identified the pattern in about 90 percent of large and medium-size metropolitan areas for 2000 to 2007. Detroit; Oklahoma City; Toledo, Ohio; and Greensboro, N.C., experienced the biggest rises in income segregation in the decade, while 13 areas, including Atlanta, had declines. Philadelphia and its suburbs registered the sharpest rise since 1970. 
  
 Sean F. Reardon, an author of the study and a sociologist at Stanford, argued that the shifts had far-reaching implications for the next generation. Children in mostly poor neighborhoods tend to have less access to high-quality schools, child care and preschool, as well as to support networks or educated and economically stable neighbors who might serve as role models. 
  
 The isolation of the prosperous, he said, means less interaction with people from other income groups and a greater risk to their support for policies and investments that benefit the broader public — like schools, parks and public transportation systems. About 14 percent of families lived in affluent neighborhoods in 2007, up from 7 percent in 1970, the study found. 
  
 The study groups neighborhoods into six income categories. Poor neighborhoods have median family incomes that are 67 percent or less of those of a given metropolitan area. Rich neighborhoods have median incomes of 150 percent or more. Middle-income neighborhoods are those in which the median income is between 80 percent and 125 percent. 
  
 The map of that change for Philadelphia is a red stripe of wealthy suburbs curving around a poor, blue urban center, broken by a few red dots of gentrification. It is the picture of the economic change that slammed into Philadelphia decades ago as its industrial base declined and left a shrunken middle class and a poorer urban core. 
  
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 The Germantown neighborhood, once solidly middle class, is now mostly low income. Chelten Avenue, one of its main thoroughfares, is a hard-luck strip of check-cashing stores and takeout restaurants. The stone homes on side streets speak to a more affluent past, one that William Wilson, 95, a longtime resident, remembers fondly. 
  
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 “It was real nice,” he said, shuffling along Chelten Avenue on Monday. Theaters thrived on the avenue, he said, as did a fancy department store. Now a Walgreens stands in its place. “Everything started going down in the dumps,” he said. 
  
 Philadelphia’s more recent history is one of gentrifying neighborhoods, like the Northern Liberties area, where affluence has rushed in, in the form of espresso shops, glass-walled apartments and a fancy supermarket, and prosperous new suburbs that have mushroomed in the far north and south of the metro area. 
  
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 Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard, said the evidence for the presumed adverse effects of economic segregation was inconclusive. In a recent study of low-income families randomly assigned the opportunity to move out of concentrated poverty into mixed-income neighborhoods, Professor Katz and his collaborators found large improvements in physical and mental health, but little change in the families’ economic and educational fortunes. 
  
 But there is evidence that income differences are having an effect, beyond the context of neighborhood. One example, Professor Reardon said, is a growing gap in standardized test scores between rich and poor children, now 40 percent bigger than it was in 1970. That is double the testing gap between black and white children, he said. 
  
 And the gap between rich and poor in college completion — one of the single most important predictors of economic success — has grown by more than 50 percent since the 1990s, said Martha J. Bailey, an economist at the University of Michigan. More than half of children from high-income families finish college, up from about a third 20 years ago. Fewer than 10 percent of low-income children finish, up from 5 percent. 
  
 William Julius Wilson, a sociologist at Harvard who has seen the study, argues that “rising inequality is beginning to produce a two-tiered society in America in which the more affluent citizens live lives fundamentally different from the middle- and lower-income groups. This divide decreases a sense of community.” |||||
A:
A major new study from Stanford finds that America's middle class is shrinking in a big way, reports the New York Times. The researchers looked at 117 of the nation's biggest metropolitan areas and discovered that 44% of families live in areas defined as middle class, down from 65% in 1970. Meanwhile, the number of families living in affluent neighborhoods doubled to 14%, while those in poor neighborhoods rose from 8% to 17%, notes Reuters. In short, the income gap appears to be widening. "Given that in 2008 the top 10% of earners controlled approximately 48% of all income in the United States, the increasing isolation of the affluent from the low and moderate-income families means that a significant portion of society's resources are concentrated in a smaller and smaller portion of neighborhoods," says the study.