Time was that moving out of the city and into the suburbs was a mark of success, a move solidifying a family’s foothold in the middle class and a future of upward mobility.
In the 1960s and 70s, the federal government encouraged suburban living, investing in incentives for homebuyers to fill row upon row of shiny new homes. It was the commercial format for the American Dream.
Today, however, suburbs have reached the tipping point. Suburbs today are home to a larger and faster growing poor population than both cities and rural areas — 16.4 million residents and counting. That’s according to a new report by the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institute. In the Portland metro area, the city saw its poverty population increase 71 percent between 2000 and 2011. In its suburbs, during the same period, the increase was 99 percent, nearly doubling in 10 years.
What does this matter? Here, there, poverty is all the same, right?
It matters because we cannot solve a problem without first understanding it. Indeed, there are similarities among people experiencing poverty regardless of where they live, but there are differences as well: challenges to less-affluent schools shouldering more and more children in need, obstacles in transportation access and costs, and an overburdened safety net of services.
It matters in how we plan for affordable housing. Portland proper became a high-cost housing destination while the suburbs became the last affordable place for low-income and subsidized renters, including the elderly and disabled on limited incomes.
But perhaps the most problematic challenge is the least concrete: Our perception of who is poor and homeless today.
The 99 percent, as it were, are families, with both parents working full-time and then one, if not both, losing their job. They are children, struggling in school where free and reduced-lunch programs are filling in for meals missed at home. Foreclosures and long-term unemployment have derailed families across communities with few resources or direct service.
The city’s one-night homeless count found 2,869 people sleeping in emergency shelter or on the streets. An additional 1,572 people were counted in transitional housing that same night. In addition to those figures are more than 4,800 people who received rent assistance or permanent supportive housing on the night of the count. Altogether, the city is looking at a 10 percent increase over the 2011 count. But those figures don’t include individuals and families who are doubled up, and the city’s report suggest that they may account for as many as four times the number of people sleeping in shelters or on the streets. They are, for now, far on the periphery of our political consciousness, our social programs and our solutions.
We need more flexible funding streams and greater regional collaboration to turn this around. Our perceptions must change about who is living in poverty today if we are to see the political will and collaboration needed to reverse this terrible trend.
