poland_
17 Jan 2011 / #31
It's per capita income that relates to this topic more than the list of most expensive cities. If people don't have enough income it doesn't matter how expensive the city is or isn't.
Why not just take the per capita income, adjusted by the CPI-U, then you would get the real per capita income, which you could then use to compute the percentage growth (or shrinkage) in real per capita from 2009 to 2010 .
Easier said than done.
Sometimes the obvious is the most difficult.