Suburban Poverty

Trying to understand the urban and suburban neighborhoods we live and work in is an ongoing task.  Interesting to learn that suburban poverty is growing...

As Americans flee the cities for the suburbs, many are failing to leave poverty behind.

The suburban poor outnumbered their inner-city counterparts for the first time last year, with more than 12 million suburban residents living in poverty, according to a study of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas released Thursday.

“Economies are regional now,” said Alan Berube, who co-wrote the report for the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “Where you see increases in city poverty, in almost every metropolitan area, you also see increases in suburban poverty.”

Contributing factors...

—Suburbs are adding people much faster than cities, making it inevitable that the number of poor people living in suburbs would eventually surpass those living in cities.

—The poverty rate in large cities (18.8 percent) is still higher than it is in the suburbs (9.4 percent). But the overall number of people living in poverty is higher in the suburbs in part because of population growth.

—America’s suburbs are becoming more diverse, racially and economically. “There’s poverty really everywhere in metropolitan areas because there are low-wage jobs everywhere,” Berube said.

—Recent immigrants are increasingly bypassing cities and moving directly to suburbs, especially in the South and West. Those immigrants, on average, have lower incomes than people born in the United States.

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Comments

[Joe Kennedy]

Former New Orleans mayor Marc Morial (now head of the National Urban League) called it the urbanization of the suburbs. Which means you can expect the exurbs to grow even faster, and the inner-city will... hmm... become the standard of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic... something. You think?

[hutch]

In a lot of metropolitan areas, the following is happening: (1) Upper middle class white families are moving from older suburbs closer to the city out to newer suburbs that are further out. (2) Upper middle class singles, empty-nesters, and homosexuals are moving back into the core of the city and living in lofts and condominiums, thus driving up rent in the inner cities. (3) Poor minorities can no longer afford the increasing rents in the inner city and are increasingly moving out to the older suburbs that have been abandoned by the first category.

[Joe W]

As one of this countries people living in poverty I can say a lot of it has to do with the way employers handle their workforce. When the carpenters(me) can't afford to live in or use the services of the places they build this country is doomed. When the janitors that clean hospitals have to rely on welfare to pay their medical bills this country is doomed. I realize we all can't be rich, but we all deserve better than what we have been given. When employers have lost their compassion for the families of their employees and fire them for caring for their sick children or attending a childs school function that sucks. Those of us who build and clean and do the menial work are the ones who really run this country - if those of us liveing in poverty could stand up and fight the employers who treat us like crap and refuse to pay us enough to survive on while giving their CEOs and boardmembers extravagent yearly bonuses at our expense - then this might be a country worth giving a crap about again.

[Scott Eaton]

It seems to me that more of the poor are actually moving to the suburbs as they are displaced by revitalization programs in the city. This seems to be happening in Chicago and suburbs.