The suburbanization of poverty

While the US Congress is busy preparing to battle a timid proposal to reform health insurance (not health care) and attacking one of the key public officials that prevented a new Depression, an article published last week by BoB herbert in the NY Times commenting on a new study ‘The suburbanization of poverty: trends in Metropolitan America, 2000 to 2008’ by the Brookings Institution provides a stark reminder of is going on in the real economy.

According to the study, from 2000 to 2008, the number of poor people in the U.S. grew by 5.2 million, reaching nearly 40 million. That represented an increase of 15.4% in the poor population, which was more than twice the increase in the population as a whole during that period. In 2008 alone, a startling 91.6 million people – more than 30 percent of the entire U.S. population - fell below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, which is a meager $21,834 for a family of four.

The authors point that while poverty has grown on the whole, the most recent data also makes clear that American poverty is becoming an increasingly suburban phenomenon. Little explanations are advanced on why poverty as a whole increased during that period and why suburbs are increasingly affected – the authors only mention that ‘since the late 1990’s jobs in almost every major metro area have continued to shift away from the urban core toward the metropolitan fringe, regardless of industry or whether the regional job was expanding or contracting – arguing that metro areas with higher levels of employment decentralization over this decade also exhibit a greater suburbanization of poverty’.

A few other arguments might also be useful in explaining such trends…Bush anyone?