This is not such good news for us suburbanites. The Brookings Institution released a paper recently entitled “The Suburbanization of Poverty: Trends in Metropolitan America, 2000 to 2008.” The gist is that poverty in the suburbs is on the rise, particularly due to the recent economic downturns of the past few years — by 2008, suburbs were home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country, particularly in midwester cities.
This is an interesting development, insofar as it bucks the stereotype of “cities =poor, suburbs=wealthy”, which is obviously a legacy from the original development of the suburbs as a place where wealthier cityfolk went if they wanted to escape from urban problems– particularly the “white flight” of about 40 or 50 years ago.
I’m not so sure this is such a big deal. It makes sense that as the suburbs got more fully developed, they developed the same economic stratification that evolved in the cities. And it’s probably more a reflection of the economic difficulties in general than anything intrinsic to the suburban life.
Interesting, though.
[…] Essentially, what I think is happening is that these original suburbs are going through the same transformation that urban areas went through in the 1950s. The infrastructure is getting older, some of the people living there are getting older, and some of the people who traditionally lived there are choosing to move to newer, sometimes more upscale, environments. But the census isn’t going to have that granular level of detail to show how people are moving from one part of the suburbs to another, so all it’s showing is population growth in the suburbs generally, and population growth in the poorer demographics. […]