More on suburban poverty

http://www.huffingtonpost.com May 20, 2013

Suburban poverty is a situation that continues to get worse as social service agencies and individual families struggle to keep up.  It's not just a matter of families re-financing their homes in order to pay for costly home additions.  This is a systemic problem that is a result of policy, corporate action, gentrification, increasing diversity of the suburban population, and so forth.  In his post published today, May 20, 2013 on the Huffington Post, Saki Knafo compactly examines the soaring American suburban poverty rate as social services agencies try to keep up with the demand in the new study released by the Brookings Institute Metropolitan Policy Program.

The Brookings Institute (http://www.brookings.edu) Metropolitan Policy Program recently released a new book by Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America.  In the book, the authors offer a new reality of the face of American poverty.  For the past few decades, the suburbans have added poor residents at a faster pace than cities.  The result is that there are more poor residents in suburbia than the central cities, composing over a third of the nation's total poor population.  The rub in this is that the social welfare infrastructure built over the last several does not fit the model of poverty.  The solution no longer fits the problem.  The authors summarize the source of the problem: job sprawl, shifts in affordable housing, population dynamics, immigration, and a struggling economy.  This raises a number of difficult challenges such as the need for more and more efficient transportation options, services, and financial resources.  However, necessity does produce opportunity.  What is that oft-quoted Chinese saying, crisis=opportunity?  Here, the opportunity exists to modernize existing infrastructure and procedures so that they fit the new crisis of suburban poverty.  Ms. Kneebone and Mr. Berube propose a number of workable solutions for the private, public, and nonprofit sector seeking to modernize poverty alleviation, community development strategies, and connect residents with economic resources.  They discuss and evaluate ongoing efforts in urban areas where local leaders are learning to do more with less while adjusting their methodologies to accommodate the metropolitan scale of poverty.  Some examples include: cross jurisdiction and sector collaboration, using data and technology in innovative ways, and integrating services and service delivery.  Sounds hopefully and forward thinking.

In his post, Mr. Knafo critically evaluates Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, neatly summarizing the causes without going into too great detail.  Pretty typical for a Huffington Post blog.  The first point he makes is that there are nearly 16.5 million suburban dwellers living in poverty, with 13 million indigents living in the cities.  He quotes Ms. Kneebone, every major suburban area in the nation has experienced growth in the poor population.  "These include older inner-ring places, but also more affluent communities that people think are immune to these sort of trends."  I suppose that it could include affluent areas of Los Angeles such Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Hancock Park, and so on.  It sounds far fetched but let's bear this out a bit.  Ms. Kneebone continues, "Suburbs are increasingly home to new immigrant populations, either because they have communities there or networks there or they're following affordable housing opportunities or jobs...In tight housing markets, where city housing has become so expensive, people have been looking for more affordable options further out."  I would posit another reason for the increased diversification of suburbia, immigrants are pursuing the age-old American dream of a house in the suburbs.  Among the areas that have seen the sharpest increase in suburban poverty are: Cape Coral, Florida; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Greensboro-High Point, North Carolina, Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Atlanta, Georgia.  Atlanta saw a 5.9 percent uptick in the suburban poverty rate between 2000 and 2010.

Ms. Kneebone also connected the rise in suburban poverty to the growth of low-paying jobs, a growing trend since the start of the recession.  According to Ms. Kneebone, "The lowest paying jobs are the most suburbanized..Retail services, construction jobs, manufacturing even."  Part of the problem, according to Milton Little, the president of the United Way of Greater Atlanta, "We have a significant increase in the number of jobs that are not offering benefits...People are having to cobble together a number of low wage jobs that don't offer health and other kinds of benefits and when they have some kind of catastrophic health crisis their income is immediately eliminated and their savings disappear."  Still think that the Affordable Healthcare Act is wrong?  Ms Kneebone, "Suburban communities haven't built up the kinds of resources and networks that have evolved in cities over time...If somebody comes and they have a utility shut-off notice, the agency may or may not have the resources to prevent that shut-off."

One case of this tragedy is LaDonna Peeples.  The health care administrator for the State of Georgia  had to take leave of absence from her work because medical issues and soon found herself without enough money to pay rent.  She turned to a wide variety of agencies in Atlanta, only to find that they mainly provided assistance to people who lived in cities.  Ms. Peeples moved to the Atlanta suburbs in 2006 but thinks it might've been easier had she stayed in her urban neighborhood of Canton, Ohio.  Yet she remains optimistic saying that there are people and resources that are trying to help anyway which way they can.