The Invisible Poverty
It’s the end of the suburbs as we know it. Numbered are the days of mega-malls, McMansions, and manicured lawns. Beneath this facade of prosperity, something darker is afoot. The suburbs are now home to something antithetical to its conception, something almost unthinkable, especially given the suburbs' association with postwar prosperity and white affluence: poverty.
Poverty, broadly speaking, has been on a slow and steady increase since the turn of the millennium. 11.5 million more people live in poverty in 2015 than in 2000, according to the Brookings Institution. Of that figure, around 48%, or 5.7 million of the growth in poverty, happened in the suburbs — roughly three times the amount of poverty growth in cities, according to the Institute for Research on Poverty. Elizabeth Kneebone, senior fellow at the Brooking Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, notes 2015 as a pivotal moment in American sociological history, where, for the first time, poverty in the suburbs outstripped poverty in the cities, with three million more living below the poverty line in the former than the latter.
What is “suburban poverty”? First we have to define “poverty.” How is such a concept measured? The U.S. Census Bureau defines poverty by “money income thresholds that vary by family size and composition.” Complicating this measurement is the Bureau’s division of poverty statistics measures into two branches, according to the Center for Poverty Research at the University of California, Davis: official and supplemental poverty measures. The former excludes the role of social safety net programs such as SNAP and welfare in raising a household’s income. Generally, research on suburban poverty is conducted with regards to the former set of data.
Secondly, what constitutes a “suburb”? The Census Bureau defines a suburb as “a municipality of more than 2,500 people located within a metropolitan area,” excluding its central city.
Finally, what defines suburban poverty, and what are the characteristics that distinguish it from urban poverty?
A common myth about suburban poverty is that it is a product of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Kneebone and peer Alan Berube argue in Confronting Suburban Poverty in America that the roots of suburban poverty are deeper and more systemic, emerging from “economic changes, population and immigration settlement patterns, and housing policies dating back to the 1980s.”
The Great Recession merely exacerbated existing patterns of inequality. The housing market crash led to millions of foreclosures, and housing and stock values plummeted nationwide by trillions, only to crawl to a slow recovery by 2012.
The suburbs, as the locus for real estate investment, was hit especially hard. Career investors were not the only ones to suffer. Andi Durand, retired pharmacist, grandmother of five and occasional real estate dabbler, recounts her brush with poverty a decade ago:
“[The mansion] was an investment. I was going to use it as pension and schooling funds for my grandchildren. Then 2008 came crashing hard … I was living out of a 2-acre mansion, without the money to even pay for heating.”
She is also an illustration of another quirk of the suburban poor: according to the Institute for Research on Poverty, they are more likely than their urban counterparts to be homeowners. Lastly, they are more likely to be white.
As Kneebone testified in “the Changing Geography of US Poverty,” housing affordability and regional market trends are the reason more low-income families are moving to the suburbs. This influx, however, does not account for the rapidity of poverty concentration in the suburbs and changing urban-suburban income make-up.
An exclusive focus on lowest-income families ignores a significant contributor to the ranks of the suburban poor — moderate-income families, numbering millions, whose “critical housing needs are sending their households into the ranks of the poor,” and who “increasingly [rely] on strained social safety net programs” to survive, according to an Op-Ed titled “Trouble in the Suburbs” by Alexandra Cawthorne Gaines for the Center for American Progress.
Perhaps the most common thread of suburban poverty is downward mobility. As more white, middle-class households encounter crises — caught in the crosshairs of rising house prices, education costs, and costs of commute — they find themselves sinking into financial quandaries.
The suburbs are a relatively new phenomenon in the U.S. — only taking off in the ‘50s, when the American economy was bolstered post-World War II and predominantly middle-class, white, well-to-do families took flight away from what they saw as the cacophony and chaos of the city and to the sanctuary of the ’burbs, enabled by America’s post-industrial refinement of commute.
Poverty in the suburbs therefore poses unique challenges. Take, for example, the geography of sprawl. Cars are a necessity in the suburbs. Public transportation services are limited, and their regional connectivity weaker, according to Kneebone.
Furthermore, the figure of available jobs within reasonable commute distances, set by Kneebone at a liberal figure of 15 miles, decreased by 17 percent from 2000 to 2010, enforcing a reliance on cars, which, if not expensive to purchase, are costly to maintain. The suburban poor are therefore deprived of more opportunities of employment and mobility, more so than their urban counterparts.
Finding a well-paying job within a reasonable distance isn’t the only obstacle encountered by the suburban poor. The discourse around poverty is clouded by the “perception gap” — a term I have adopted from social policy scholar Scott W. Allard as he used it in an interview with Tanvi Misra in “The Biggest Myths of Suburban Poverty,” published on Citylab.com — of poverty as a uniquely urban phenomenon. Most suburban poverty falls under a “blind spot.”
Action to alleviate poverty often concentrates on inner cities, which have historically been coded as black, impoverished neighborhoods following the War on Poverty. According to Mother Jones senior editor Aaron Weiner, nonprofit organizations and governmental programs on poverty are “still targeting low-income clusters in urban centers today rather than the diffusion of people who can no longer afford to live near their work.”
Human service organizations spend around eight times less per each poor resident in suburban areas than they do in urban areas, according to the Institute of Research for Poverty. Although the landscape of poverty has been changing in the past few decades, the alleviation efforts have yet to catch up.
Existing efforts to combat inequality in the suburbs are inadequate, in part due to the perception that the suburbs are untouchable by poverty. Worse, Weiner contends, people living in poverty in the suburbs are “isolated from the government offices, social services, and networks of friends and relatives on which they once relied.”
Furthermore, according to Allard, they are also regularly isolated from opportunity, marginalized from politics, and experience the same racial segregation as their urban counterparts.
Not all research into suburban poverty has been unanimous in their alarm at data pointing to its growth. In no small part due to the staggering diversity of suburban classification — the “suburb” as a geographical and demographical construct is itself frustratingly eclectic, encompassing a variety of areas of varying population densities, racial makeup, and zoning practices — the issue of pinpointing suburban poverty, especially relative suburban poverty, is a complex one, one that yields at times contradictory data and conclusions.
Janice Fanning Madden’s study “Has the concentration of income and poverty among suburbs of large U.S. metropolitan areas changed over time?” finds that contrary to the assertions of contemporary policy analysts such as Allard who claim that poverty across suburban regions of all U.S. metropolitan areas is pervasive, especially in suburban communities built after the 1970s, poverty and income concentrations have not, in fact, increased in the suburbs over the past two decades, generally speaking.
If there are truly any cases of increasing concentrations of suburban poverty, Madden states, they are limited to “suburban municipalities of older metropolitan areas in the northeast and midwest.”
Another study, “Re-evaluating differences in poverty among central city, suburban, and nonmetropolitan areas of the US,” uses Foster et. al’s “distribution-sensitive poverty measure.” By accounting for data on poverty severity, not just prevalence, their study suggests that urban poverty yet remains more severe.
How do we move forward? How do we address suburban poverty? Even if the consensus on whether or not poverty is experiencing growth in all suburban areas is still murky, poverty is a reality of all suburbs. We must educate the American public on the demographics of poverty, to combat the unrealistic, damaging view of the suburbs as a place untouched by poverty.
Furthermore, I believe that suburban poverty should not be viewed as an issue isolated from urban poverty — the twin phenomena are linked, so alleviation measures should be global and wholistic, targeting both.
I propose that we maintain federal funding of safety net programs, such as food stamps, introduce more price fixes to suburban housing areas, increase public funding of human service programs to galvanize the unemployed and low-income workers seeking to advance in the labor market, and divert more resources towards suburban poverty, instead of maintaining a myopic focus on urban poverty.
Diverting resources should not, however, funnel away much-needed funds for inner-city poverty. Over-reliance on existing resources and organizations will only tax all existing frameworks for aid thin and exacerbate poverty across all areas. Instead, we should establish more new nonprofit organizations capable of tackling suburban poverty.