From Salon: http://www.salon.com/2013/08/03/the_suburbs_are_dead_and_thats_not_a_good_thing/
The resurgence of cities has been awful on the ‘burbs: More crime, poverty, burned-out malls and foreclosed homes
By Leigh Gallagher
Saturday, Aug 3, 2013
One could argue that the resurgence of our cities does not necessarily portend the fall of the suburbs. But while many cities have been benefiting from an influx of wealth, the suburbs have been suffering a rise in poverty. From 2000 to 2010, the number of poor in the suburbs or the nation’s largest metro areas grew by 53 percent to a record 15.3 million. And while poverty has increased in cities as well, the growth rate in the number of poor living in the suburbs was more than twice that in cities during the decade—and the suburbs are now home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country. This isn’t just the Great Recession at work; as early as 2005, the suburban poor outnumbered their city counterparts by almost a million. “We think of poverty as a really urban phenomenon or an ultra-rural phenomenon. It’s increasingly a suburban issue,” says Elizabeth Kneebone, Brookings fellow and coauthor of a recent Brookings book on the topic, “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America.”
The reasons for this shift are many. During the growth years of the 1990s and 2000s, low-skill construction and service jobs boomed in the suburbs. Soon immigrants began bypassing cities and immigrating directly to the suburbs and exurbs. But these low-skill jobs were the first to vaporize in the housing bust and ensuing recession. At the same time, the longer-term collapse of the manufacturing industry outside midwestern cities pushed many people into poverty. Some of this is also due to the squeeze on the middle class in general. Indeed, the rapid rise in the poor population in the suburbs in the 2000s can’t be explained simply by more low-income residents moving there; a wide swath of the new suburban poor are longtime suburban residents who weren’t poor in the beginning of the decade but fell below the poverty line as incomes stagnated and home prices increased.
According to one study, nearly three-quarters of suburban non-profits are seeing new visitors with no previous connection to safety net programs of any kind. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, Steve Gibson, executive director of Byron Community Ministries, says many people he sees seeking help were until very recently members of the middle class. “I hear it over and over again,” he told a reporter for Next City magazine. “ ‘We used to donate to you.’ ” In Long Island’s Suffolk County, the number of food stamp cases jumped 55 percent from 2010 to 2012, and the emergency-housing caseload hit a ten-year peak with nearly five hundred families and three hundred individuals living in shelters and motels.
Suburban poverty poses different kinds of challenges than urban poverty. There are fewer social services in the suburbs, so the safety net is “patchier and spread thinner” than in large cities, says Brookings’ Kneebone. And even when services do exist, it’s difficult for the poor to get to them if they lack access to a car. Suburban poverty also tends to be hidden behind closed doors as its residents fear the stigma of having their neighbors learn they’re getting government assistance.
Continue reading at: http://www.salon.com/2013/08/03/the_suburbs_are_dead_and_thats_not_a_good_thing/
