a different interpretation

[ProblemAgain]

i think they missed the point of their data... it isn't so much that the poor are moving to suburbia as much as it is the middle class who have lived in suburbia are sliding down the scale into poverty as decent jobs become harder to find. and even if your income remains the same, many employers have tossed away the medical benefits thus essentially lowering your income if you now supply your own or letting you join the ranks of the uninsured. in addition, many employers have opted out of having anything to do with employee retirements.....yep...welcome to the new reality

Report says poor are moving to nation's suburbs

May 20, 2013 12:47 PM ET

LOS ANGELES (AP) - More poor people live in the nation's suburbs than in urban cities because of affordable housing, service-sector jobs and the increased use of housing vouchers, according to a study released Monday.

The number of those in poverty living in suburbs jumped 67 percent between 2000 and 2011, a much larger increase than in cities, researchers for the Brookings Institution said. Suburbs, however, still have a smaller percentage of the poor than cities do.

The report notes that poor people were pulled to the suburbs by more affordable homes and followed jobs that were often low paying. But those who moved to the suburbs also saw manufacturing jobs disappear and housing prices plummet following the economic recession.

"The myth of suburban prosperity has been a stubborn one," Christopher Niedt, academic director of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, told the Los Angeles Times (http://lat.ms/12FKPNm ). Even as suburban poverty emerged, "many poorer communities were so segregated from the wealthy in suburbs that many people were able to ignore it."

Suburban cities have been ill equipped to handle the surge. In Irvine, the nonprofit Families Forward use to hand groceries to about 25 families every week; now it's more than 160. The estimated number of poor people in Irvine rose from more than 12,000 to nearly 21,000 in a decade, Brookings found.

"Everything is nicely maintained. Things look good on the surface," said Margie Wakeham, executive director of Families Forward. "But the need has just skyrocketed."

The newspaper said poverty shifted to the suburbs earlier in Los Angeles than nationwide. About half of the poor in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Santa Ana and their outskirts have lived in suburbia for decades, according to Brookings' analysis. That percentage rose to 53.4 in 2011.

The report also shows a slight increase in New York City suburban poverty.

[Ioruach]

You are right, Problem.  There was even an article in Sunday's Minneapolis paper about increasing poverty in the suburbs around the Twin Cities.  But it was made quite clear that those who were moving into poverty were either those who had lived in the same suburbs for years or immigrants moving into these areas for work, finding only minimum wage jobs and becoming the working poor

[ProblemAgain]

add to that the shrinking net worth as real estate values plummeted while debts remained the same or even increased and the net worth of the middle class took a drastic beating in the financial meltdown. and people wrongly assume that the outsourcing of american jobs to foreign countries is limited to bluecollar factory style work. it is not. many companies have outsourced their behind the scenes work as in accounting and payroll to place like india. add to that that even medium size companies have outsourced their customer service and support lines to other countries and you can see why we do have an ugly employment picture as a future scenario. even the companies that crow and prattle about being local and wave their american flag outsource...a bank i know of in texas beats it's chest about patriotism and the red white and blue...your local neighbor on and so forth...but call the customer service and you are talking to india...those are dollars leaving the country never to return...other countries don't buy from us in an equal trade-off...if they did, we would not have the massive outflows of dollars to china and elsewhere..

[exedir]

It is not surprising this is happening, age matters.  And the suburbs are aging.  Metro areas are much like trees, they grow in rings.  Cities traditionally grow in circles as the core becomes "dense" with problems, traffic, crime, security, education, a whole host of life style issues.  As as such these problems are created by density as much as distance, if people move out, and others fellow, well, so will everything else.

Growth can and does become rot, and if an area is not "renewed", rot usually happens as a result as areas are abandoned and the solution is to move, move somewhere the problems do not exist, yet.

This has happened in Europe where places outside the cities were "created" to remove people from urban problems and issues, and in the end, leaving the very rich or the impossibly poor in the cities.  And many cities became successfully in separating the rich and the poor, working on the premise that as long as the rich were not disturbed or otherwise bothered, the inner rings could be left to the underclasses and ethnic immigrants.