The Suburbanization of Poverty
There is no word more evocative in the urban vernacular than "suburb." For most of us, those two syllables conjure a very specific type of place, with a specific kind of people comfortably living there.
"We think about suburbs in one way," says Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow at the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program. "We have a very stereotypical view of suburbs as middle-class, affluent, Leave-It-To-Beaver type places."
And yet, over the last decade, suburbs have increasingly become home to America's poor. Between 2000 and 2011, the population living in American cities below the poverty line increased by 29 percent. During that same time, across the country in the suburbs of metropolitan areas as diverse as Atlanta and Detroit and Salt Lake City, the ranks of the poor grew by 64 percent. Today, more poor people live in the suburbs (16.4 million of them) than in U.S. cities (13.4 million), despite the perception that poverty remains a uniquely urban problem.
As Kneebone and colleague Alan Berube have written before for Cities, this geographic shift has been no quirk of the recession. It began before the housing market crashed, and will inevitably tax communities unaccustomed to housing the poor well into and beyond the recovery. The changing shape of poverty is more systemic than an economic downturn, as Kneebone and Berube document in a new book that corrals several years of research on the topic, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America.
"Often when we talk about rising suburban poverty, people automatically think about, 'Well, who’s moving into these neighborhoods?'" Kneebone says. "But it’s not just people moving in. There have been two downturns in the last decade, and long-running structural changes in the economy, finding a lot of long-time suburban residents growing poorer, slipping down the economic ladder."
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/05/suburbanization-poverty/5633/
= new reply since forum marked as read
