The economically turbulent 2000s have redrawn America’s geography of poverty in more ways than one. After two downturns and subsequent recoveries that failed to reach down the economic ladder, the number of people living below the federal poverty line ($23,492 for a family of four in 2012) remains stubbornly stuck at record levels. Today, more of those residents live in suburbs than in big cities or rural communities, a significant shift compared to 2000, when the urban poor still outnumbered suburban residents living in poverty.
I got to this by reading an article linked to by Tyler Cowen.
You may recall the Haiku I wrote based on my road trip:
Gentrification
Bike-friendly beyond all sense
Poor people moved…to where?
Basically, I explain the phenomenon as follows.
1. Spending shifts from goods to education and health care (long-term trend. See Kling-Schulz, The New Commanding Heights)
2. Inner cities become impoverished, as manufacturing relocates and urban blight drives out the middle class.
3. The biggest urban employers become universities and hospitals. As they expand their presence in cities, they employ a lot of educated professionals. This leads to gentrification.
4. The urban poor get pushed out to the suburbs.
It seems to me that a lot of economic trends can be explained by the New Commanding Heights story.
One other factor that drives 3 (at least that I observe looking at Boston) is that companies seeking to hire recent college grads locate themselves to be accessible to same – which means close to universities, or at least to bus/rail transit from the areas around same. Which reinforces the pressure for gentrification.
Interesting. And yet, I have noticed that a disproportionate share of the poverty fighting government infrastructure (social services, etc.) has not migrated to the suburbs. It is still disproportionate in urban hubs.
In Chicago, at least, it’s the middle class who’ve been leaving the city, not the poor (or the wealthy):
http://danielhertz.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/incseggif.gif
That’s a good narrative, but does it explains Washington, DC?
I assume (I didn’t find good data) that DC has always had a relatively low manufacturing base and a relatively high services base.
DC is undergoing rapid gentrification, but it seems to be that more families are choosing to locate in the city, rather than commute in from the suburbs.
Well, this will certainly change! Both higher ed and medicine are overdue for a substantial reduction of force.
I agree with how you explain the phenomenon of gentrification but there is another factor at work that also explains poverty in the suburbs: age of the suburb. For example the first ring of suburbs around Detroit (Redford Township, Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, Taylor, Lincoln Park, etc.) have been around for quite a while and have older houses with aging populations. The children of the people that lived there have moved on to the farther suburbs or exburbs like Plymouth, Canton, etc.