Across the nation, suburbs now surpass cities and rural areas in the number of people living in poverty
If you want to know what homelessness looks like in the 21st century, you have to look beyond the familiar hoods and urban alleys.
You have to head out to the 'burbs.
Nationwide, there’s been a tipping point: The suburbs are now home to more people experiencing poverty than our nation’s cities, with the population increasing at twice the rate. According to a new study by the Brookings Institute, the poor population in our suburbs grew 64 percent between 2000 and 2011, compared to 29 percent in our cities. By 2011, 16.4 million residents in suburbia lived below the poverty line, more than 3 million than the number in living in U.S. cities, according to the study.
For decades now, poverty in Portland and Vancouver’s suburbs have outpaced the city proper. Our suburbs are home to 189,515 people living below the poverty line, more than twice the entire population of Beaverton and more than Gresham, Oregon City and Forest Grove combined.
Across the country, poverty grew to record levels in the 2000s (“It’s the economy, stupid.”) But the numbers of poor amassing in our suburbs was on the rise even before the Great Recession and the sluggish, jobless recovery. Once an icon of America’s upwardly mobile, suburbia is grinding against the weight of economic stagnation, and the dynamics of urban versus suburban poverty is posing a challenge to how we identify who is poor, why they are in need and subsequently what society can do to reverse this trend.
The Brookings Institute’s Elizabeth Kneebone, who along with Alan Berube co-authored the new book “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America,” says their book is as much about how we got here as it is understanding what needs to be done to get us out.
For decades, programs and agendas have focused on inner city poverty, but that agenda won’t work as well with suburban populations where economic opportunities are limited. Kneebone says we have to approach the solution not as a collection of government agendas, but with a more metropolitan approach.
(Read more about what people in the region are saying about urban poverty here.)
Joanne Zuhl: What did you learn about our region?
Elizabeth Kneebone: Both the urban area and the suburbs saw a rapid pace of growth in the poor population over the decade. In the city of Portland and Vancouver, the poor population grew by 71 percent, well above the national average. Yet in the suburbs, the poor population almost doubled in that time period, increasing by 99 percent.
J.Z.: Is that astounding – do you gasp at those numbers like I just did?
E.K.: That’s what is so striking about the 2000s — it’s not just the shift we’re seeing and where the poor population is growing, but the magnitude and the pace at which the poor population has grown in recent years. That’s part of the challenge for people and places dealing with this issue. In many cases this has happened so quickly, so rapidly, and particularly thinking about suburbs that don’t necessarily have the same history of building up infrastructure and safety net supports that can help low-income families, that a lot of communities are playing catch-up. Or maybe don’t even appreciate the extent to which their neighbors are struggling because it happened so quickly in so many places in recent years.
J.Z.: What’s causing this?
E.K.: Big picture, there are two main reasons we see growth of poverty in the suburbs. It’s when poor residents or families are moving into suburban communities, or as longer term residents have slipped down the economic ladder. In terms of people moving in, suburbs have grown faster than cities in the 2000s. And as they grew they became more diverse, economically and demographically.
Part of this is due to where affordable housing is in a region, and that can be shaped by a number of factors. Zoning and land use make a difference. But so do things like housing age. As housing becomes older, it becomes more affordable.
There is also the role of subsidies. We’ve seen an increasing shift toward Housing Choice (Section 8) vouchers, a portable subsidy, and they have been increasingly used in the suburbs.
And then you have the role of the foreclosure crisis recently. Across our metro areas, about three-quarters of foreclosures that have happened since the collapse of the housing market happened in the suburbs.
Housing dynamics definitely play a role, but so do jobs. Jobs have continued to suburbanize over the years. And lower-wage jobs tend to be even more suburbanize than higher-wage jobs. Manufacturing tends to be more suburbanized, and that was hit hard over the past decade.
J.Z.: Is there a cultural impact to these facts? Is there something not good that this is where it’s happening?
E.K.: With (Section 8) vouchers, there have been concerted efforts from a policy perspective to de-concentrate poverty, especially in particularly distressed and very poor urban neighborhoods. The idea is you want to offer mobility so that these people can move to higher opportunity areas. Because there are a lot of challenges that come along with living in concentrated poverty. It can make it that much harder to get out of poverty because many of these communities are facing higher crime rates, poorer performing schools, poorer health outcomes – so there is a benefit to de-concentrating poverty. The challenge comes when mobility alone doesn’t necessarily ensure that these residents are moving to higher opportunity places. They may not have the counseling services or information about where those opportunities are. So even as the population becomes more suburbanized, in many cases they’re ending up in lower-income suburbs that are less jobs-rich than elsewhere in the region and may not have those connections to transit or better schools that one would hope for.
J.Z.: Do you think there’s anything to the argument that we’ve become a magnet for services and that’s why those numbers are climbing?
E.K.: Looking at the magnitude of these numbers, it’s clearly more than just people moving into the region. This is a region that has grown over the decade and the suburbs did grow faster than the city. The suburb grew about 18 percent compared to 11 percent in the city. This is a good pace of growth in the community, but not enough to explain such rapid increases in the poor population.
It’s about longer-term residents falling behind economically. And you can look to a decade that saw two downturns, including the worst recession since The Great Depression.
There are also structural changes that impact these trends. We’ve seen some of the fastest job growth occurring in occupations that pay lower wages, that even if a family is working full-time, it may not be enough to keep them above the poverty line.
J.Z.: If this trend continues for another 10 years, what are we in for?
E.K.: It’s so important to not just look at the overall changes in the poor populations, but to understand how these trends are playing out across communities. Suburbs increasingly struggle with these issues alongside cities, yet, our perceptions and policies haven’t kept pace with how quickly things have changed. And the challenge there is that we don’t really realign programs and policies that are in place to address poverty in communities, than we risk creating the same kind of challenges in suburban areas that we’ve been struggling with for decades in urban areas.
We’ve seen concentrated poverty rise in cities and suburbs. A third of the poor population in suburbs live in neighborhoods where poverty rates are 20 percent or higher. And that’s about the level where we see the challenges associated with concentrated poverty begin to accrue. There should be some feeling of urgency here in thinking about how do we better adapt to the new geography of poverty, especially in a narrative of limited resources to better meet the needs of both urban and suburban residents. Thinking regionally how we can connect these residents in these communities to the kinds of opportunities that provide a pathway out of poverty.
J.Z.: Do you conclude that our anti-poverty efforts from the federal level have failed us?
E.K.: In the 50 years since Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty, we’ve learned a lot, from both the successes and the failures over time, on how to address the challenges of poverty. The challenge is that the systems we’ve built up over the decade to alleviate the poverty in place have left us with a very fragmented system and one that was build largely to address distressed inner-city neighborhoods. So it can be very difficult to make that system work and adapt to the landscape of poverty in the suburban communities.
This is not about how the problem has shifted. Really this is showing that these are regional challenges – that suburbs and cities alike are struggling with these issues, and the resources have not grown to keep pace with the need. So how do we better deploy those resources to try and overcome the challenges of a fragmented system? From the regional perspective and ending the poverty silo.
It’s not just about finding stable housing for a family, it’s also about housing near good education opportunities and growing job opportunities so workers can connect to the kind of employment that would help them work their way out of poverty. If not nearby is there transportation? All of these things relate to each other. I think the most promising models we’ve seen in addressing this are ones that try to overcome the fragmentation of the system to create a more scaled approach that cuts across jurisdictional boundaries but also these policy silos to really address this at the scale at which these challenges play out.
J.Z.: Can you give a few examples of what you’re talking about?
E.K.: There are a number of good examples. In the Houston region, there’s a human services provider called Neighborhood Centers. This is a $275 million operation in 70 sites across the city and suburbs. It blends 35 federal programs with state, local and private investments to create a really seamless continuum of services for residents. At the same time, it has the scale to operate across all of those programs, but really invests in understanding the needs of the different communities that it’s serving. It takes a lot to do that. There are a lot of administrative costs to working this way, but their scale allows them to do this and navigate those barriers so that they’re more effective, efficient and responsive.
In Chicago, it’s municipalities that came together after the foreclosure crisis and instead of competing with each other, they worked together to attract federal funding and have continued to work as a collaborative around things such as neighborhood stabilization and housing, transit development and long-term planning in how to revitalize their community in balanced ways.
In Seattle, southern suburban districts came together with the Seattle School District to address achievement gaps, and did so with a cradle-to-career collective impact model, where they’re working together and agreeing to the same set of metrics and the same set of goals to close the achievement gaps. The program just recently won a Race to the Top award.
The most promising models find ways to work at a better scale. They’re working across jurisdictional and policy silos to make limited funding stretch further and more strategically address the issues of the residents they’re serving.
J.Z.: Why was it important for you and your co-author to create the Action Toolkit?
E.K.: It’s intended to help people in these communities engage in these issues. It’s really trying to give people the tools to start the conversation in their community and think about creating change to more effectively address the needs of people.
J.Z.: I’m assuming you’re talking about bringing not just government officials, but nonprofits and organizations around the table. How much of this involves bringing people who are experiencing poverty to the table?
E.K.: I think having that community engagement is very important. Given the scale and scope of need today, this is not something that’s going to be solved just by government, or nonprofits or even the private sector. It’s really going to take collaborative and integrated solutions. And for those solutions to be really effective it is important to have the voice of the residents and the community that’s really struggling with these issues at the table.
J.Z.: How much do stereotypes become an issue or obstacle in dealing with this?
E.K.: That’s a really important point. The geography of poverty has changed, but our perceptions haven’t kept pace. That can be a barrier, in both understanding where the need is but who we are talking about. And in some communities, there can be real tensions that come out because a community is changing. People can marginalize the issue or turn away from the issue. Whereas when you really look at the numbers of who is struggling, this is happening in all communities, including places people often thought of as immune to these trends. And it can be invisible in these communities to a certain extent. And no one place can really tackle this on its own.
This is a shift that has been playing out over decades, and the tip that we’ve seen toward the suburbs happened even before the Great Recession. So even as we hope to see the poverty numbers move in the right direction as the recovery numbers begin to take hold, the idea that this is a regional challenge will persist.
Learn more about suburban poverty and the Action Toolkit at www.confrontingsuburbanpoverty.org
