Has poverty become suburbanized?

August 1, 2011

For many years, urban scholars considered poverty to be a problem of the inner city; suburbs, as sociologist Mark Baldassare describes in his 1992 work, were traditionally where middle-class Americans moved to in order to escape the disintegrating city center. This widely accepted dynamic deserved reconsideration after the 2000 Census. Based on 2000 Census data, sociologists G. Thomas Kingsley and Kathryn L. S. Pettit observe that the percentage of suburban high poverty census tracts has increased from 11 percent in 1980 to 15 percent in 2000. Looking at Census data between 2000 and 2008, a Brookings Institution report by Scott W. Allard and Benjamin J. Roth finds that many suburbs of Chicago and Washington, D.C. experienced a 40 percentage point increase in the number of poor individuals in recent years. Social scientists are beginning to look more closely at suburban poverty, exploring its causes, dynamics, and long-term consequences.

Relocation and gentrification

Geographers Todd Sink and Brian Ceh argue in their 2011 study that the increase in suburban poverty is due, in part, to the relocation of the urban poor under the government program Hope VI. Relying on a combination of relocation data from almost 4000 voucher recipients and Census data, Sink and Ceh find that former inner-city residents cluster in 16 suburban areas to the south and west of Chicago. The movement of poor residents to the suburbs, they argue, does not improve their standards of living, but rather moves pockets of higher poverty outside of the inner city. Between 1990 and 2000, poverty rates in relocation areas preferred by the Hope VI voucher recipients increased between 4 and 10 percentage points, while concurrently gentrification decreased poverty rates in the inner city.

Shifting distribution

Thomas J. Cooke, a geographer at the University of Connecticut, researches older “inner-ring suburbs” built between 1950 and 1969. Using the nationally representative Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), Cooke compares changes in poverty between inner-ring suburbs and city centers. In 2005 there were more poor people living in the suburbs than in 1989, but the increase in poverty rates slowed after 2001. Inner-city poverty follows a similar trajectory and has also remained stable since 2001. Cooke concludes that nationwide economic trends are an important explanation for rising suburban poverty.

In his case study of the Atlanta metropolitan region, social scientist Sugie Lee argues for a multilevel approach to explaining increased poverty levels in the suburbs of Atlanta. Lee bases his analysis on Census data in the Neighborhood Change Database (NCDB) and the Census Transportation Planning Products (CTTP). Lee finds that the overall poverty rate of the Atlanta metropolitan area declined between 1970 and 2000, but the distribution of poverty shifted. Poverty decreased in the inner city by 6 percent between 1990 and 2000, while inner-ring suburban poverty steadily increased by 8.6 percent from 1970 to 2000. Outer-ring suburbs, in contrast, still seem to be immune to the growing poverty. The suburbs that are furthest removed from downtown Atlanta have seen a steady decrease in poverty over the last 30 years. Lee observes a non-uniform distribution of poverty in the metro region of Atlanta: racial segregation contributes to the clustered distribution of poverty, particularly in the southwestern suburbs. The growing Hispanic population, for example, has suffered disproportionately from rising rents and unemployment, which in turn affect poverty rates in Hispanic-dominated suburbs. Yet, growing unemployment and rising rents do not only affect minorities. According to Lee, the lack of jobs and affordable housing are the main culprits of growing suburban poverty across racial groups.

Diversified poverty

The causes of rising suburban poverty continue to be debated, yet many researchers agree that suburbs exhibit a more diverse structure of poverty than the inner city. In her typology of poor suburbs, sociologist Alexandra K. Murphy identifies three different types of disadvantaged suburban areas: symbiotic suburbs (suburban areas that mirror conditions of the poor inner city), skeletal suburbs (formerly working-class areas that have suffered due to the downturn of the manufacturing sector), and overshadowed suburbs (generally affluent suburbs with deep pockets of poverty). Categorizing suburbs in terms of their affluence or poverty is a rather complicated task. Whereas some suburbs struggle with increasing poverty, others continue to align with Baldassare’s description of the suburb as a middle-class or upper-middle-class refuge. Cooke’s analysis, for instance, shows that poverty rates in outer-ring suburbs decreased between 1989 and 2005. According to Cooke, those suburbs absorb wealthy residents who leave the inner suburbs and the city center. Allard and Roth also find that poverty rates declined in some parts of the country, such as in the metropolitan area of Los Angeles. Understanding those shifting dynamics of poverty and wealth distribution in suburban America will be one of the most challenging tasks of future research.

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