Friday, January 22, 2010
The American suburb is losing its luster as the symbol of middle-class comfort and prosperity. The Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program says poverty is significantly up in the ‘burbs, growing by 25% from 9.9 million people in 2000 to 12.4 million in 2008. This increase was larger than that experienced in large cities, small towns and rural areas. Suburbs now are home to about one-third of the nation’s poor, according to the Brookings report.
The think tank argues that if the definition of “low income” is adjusted to represent everyone living below 200% of the federal poverty line, this would mean that more than 30% of the U.S. population—91.6 million Americans—fall into this category. Again, suburbs during the last decade experienced the largest growth of people who found themselves living within this threshold.
The suburban areas with the highest poverty rates were those surrounding McAllen and El Paso, Texas (36.7% and 31.0%) and Bakersfield and Fresno, California ((24.2% and 18.8%).
-Noel Brinkerhoff
The Suburbanization of Poverty: Trends in Metropolitan America, 2000 to 2008 (Metropolitan Policy Program) (pdf)
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