Poor in suburbs outnumber those in cities, study claims

Many of America's cities have grown and prospered over the last few decades, showing surprising declines in poverty and crime rates.

America's iconic suburbs, however, have shown a dissimilar trend, so much so that there are now more poor people living there than in urban centers, according to a new analysis from the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution. The federal poverty level for a family of four is an annual income of $23,550.

As the poor population has surged throughout the nation since the turn of the century, the number of poor people living in suburbs grew 67 percent between 2000 and 2011 -- a much bigger jump than in cities. The "War on Poverty" that was begun by Lyndon Johnson 50 years ago faces a very different battlefield today, and public policy should shift to reflect that, the study finds.

The rise in suburban poor is not just a question of people getting squeezed out of overpriced city housing, write study authors Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube in the book "Confronting Suburban Poverty in America."

"The spread of suburban poverty has many causes, including job sprawl, shifts in affordable housing, population dynamics, immigration, and a struggling economy," Brookings wrote in a press release for the analysis.

In the opening chapter (PDF) of their analysis, the authors argue that it is imperative to "ensure that the next economy this country builds is an opportunity-rich economy, (and that) a reformed and remade antipoverty framework must be flexible and built to the scale of the challenge."

No longer can officials focus their anti-poverty strategies on ghettos or barrios or isolated rural regions, the authors claim. Instead, embracing the new reality of prevalent suburban poverty "has the potential to better alleviate poverty and increase access to opportunity throughout the country, with improvements in flexibility and efficiency accruing not just to the suburbs, but to the urban and rural poor as well."