An Increase in Poverty in the Suburbs: Are the Suburbs Becoming More Like the Cities?

The New York Times had a piece last week about the increase in suburban poverty since 2000:

The poor population in America’s suburbs — long a symbol of a stable and prosperous American middle class — rose by more than half after 2000, forcing suburban communities across the country to re-evaluate their identities and how they serve their populations.

The increase in the suburbs was 53 percent, compared with 26 percent in cities. The recession accelerated the pace: two-thirds of the new suburban poor were added from 2007 to 2010.

“The growth has been stunning,” said Elizabeth Kneebone, a senior researcher at the Brookings Institution, who conducted the analysis of census data. “For the first time, more than half of the metropolitan poor live in suburban areas.”

As a result, suburban municipalities — once concerned with policing, putting out fires and repairing roads — are confronting a new set of issues, namely how to help poor residents without the array of social programs that cities have, and how to get those residents to services without public transportation. Many suburbs are facing these challenges with the tightest budgets in years.

“The whole political class is just getting the memo that Ozzie and Harriet don’t live here anymore,” said Edward Hill, dean of the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University.

So why is this happening? I think it’s just because the suburbs are simply getting older. If you think about it, the very concept of the “suburbs” developed in the post-WWII era, part of the baby boom explosion in population that pushed so many people from the urban environments to the then-bucolic suburban enclaves.  But the areas that were developed at that time have started to show their age, with the children and grandchildren of those original suburbanites migrating to newer, larger, posher developments. So some of the older, less fashionable suburban areas are now affordable for people at the lower ends of the income spectrum, which is actually a good thing to the extent that it flies in the face of the typical complaint about the suburbs lacking economic and racial diversity. But it’s a bad thing insofar as most of these suburban areas are ill-equipped to provide the social services needed by the working poor.

Essentially, what I think is happening is that these original suburbs are going through the same transformation that urban areas went through in the 1950s.  The infrastructure is getting older, some of the people living there are getting older, and some of the people who traditionally lived there are choosing to move to newer, sometimes more upscale, environments. But the census isn’t going to have that granular level of detail to show how people are moving from one part of the suburbs to another, so all it’s showing is population growth in the suburbs generally, and population growth in the poorer demographics.

Arguably, then, the suburbs of today are starting to demographically reflect the outer regions of the city (think: the Bronx, or uptown Manhattan) from 50 years ago.  And they’re bringing both the same challenges that those urban areas had (poverty, crime) as well as some of the benefits of both economic and ethnic diversity.