Study Finds Huge Growth of Poor People in Nation’s Suburbs – Wait, How Can Poor People Afford to Live in Suburbs?

Answer:  They Can’t

When The Dismal Political Economist, and he assumes others think of poverty in the U. S. he thinks of low income individuals and families huddled in substandard housing in the center of American cities.  This image is no longer correct.



Housing in the Cleveland Suburbs, Doesn't
Look Like Where Ward, June,Wally and the Beaver Live.



The increase in the suburbs was 53 percent, compared with 26 percent in cities. The recession accelerated the pace: two-thirds of the new suburban poor were added from 2007 to 2010.

“The growth has been stunning,” said Elizabeth Kneebone, a senior researcher at the Brookings Institution, who conducted the analysis of census data. “For the first time, more than half of the metropolitan poor live in suburban areas.”

This is somewhat unbelievable.  How could this happen?

Poverty has been growing in the suburbs for years — along with the population. But the 53 percent increase in poverty far outstripped the 14 percent population increase in the past decade, speeding the change in their status as upper-middle-class enclaves. They have been attracting immigrants following construction jobs and families from cities seeking inexpensive housing as suburbs aged.

Federal vouchers to get poor people into private housing also contributed, Ms. Kneebone said. Cleveland was No. 15 among the country’s top 100 metropolitan areas for increase in suburban share of vouchers.

Ok, government programs to move poor people to the suburbs with the idea that putting them into middle class neighborhoods would make them middle class didn’t work, and no one should have expected that it would.  Families are poor because they lack education, training and marketable skills, not because of where they live.

Life in these suburbs is now difficult.  Food banks support many people.  That’s correct, providing free or low cost food, something Americans did for people in other countries is now a major program for the U. S.

At Vineyard Community Church in Wickliffe, another Cleveland suburb, Brent Paulson, the pastor, said he had to post an employee in the driveway the day the church’s food bank was open to coax people inside, they were so ashamed to ask for help.

In a sign of just how far the economic distress had spread, one volunteer saw his former boss come to the pantry, Mr. Paulson said.

The Cleveland Food Bank, which serves six counties, doubled its distribution between 2005 and 2010. “There’s this sense of surprise,” said Anne Goodman, the director, “this feeling that this has got to be a mistake. It has got to be a bad dream.”

Maybe in the next Republican debate people like Mr. Perry and Mr. Romney can explain how cutting taxes for the wealthy and cutting services for people in the suburbs who literally do not have enough income to feed themselves will help.  That is, help those people, not help people like Mr. Romney and Mr. Perry who have done quite well with the help of their friends and business connections.