---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: John A Imani <[email protected]> Date: Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 10:54 AM Subject: Economist-Poverty has moved to the suburbs To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Broke in the burbs Poverty has moved to the suburbs Jul 20th 2013 | MARIETTA, GEORGIA http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21582019-poverty-has-moved-suburbs-broke-burbs When the bank runs out of patience KIM, who is 35 years old and has two children, left high school to look after her mother, a cocaine addict. When Kims marriage began to fail and her husband fell ill, she developed addictions of her ownto alcohol and pills, from which she has been free for eight months. She now works at a fast-food restaurant, making, she guesses, around $14,000 a year. Melissa once had an event-planning company. She says it was doing well, but when the economy went down it took my company with it. She is now jobless. She and her 16-month-old son live in an apartment provided by the Centre for Family Resources (CFR), a charity. Kim and Melissa live in Cobb County, north-west of Atlanta. It ranks fifth out of Georgias 159 counties in income per head, at $33,514well above the American median of $27,915 and nearly three times the poverty level of $11,484 for a single person. It is home to a big convention centre and some smart malls and hotels. But it is also home to many who are hard-up. In 2000 6.5% of the people in Cobb County were poor; in 2011, 12.6% were. CFR saw requests for help with the rent rise from 207 in January 2010 to 577 in January this year. The number of people who came in asking for assistance of some kind rose from 754 in January 2009 to 1,326 in January 2013. Americans tend to think of poverty as urban or ruralhousing estates or shacks in the woods. And it is true that poverty rates tend to be higher in cities and the countryside. But the suburbs are where you will find Americas biggest and fastest-growing poor population, as Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube of the Brookings Institution explain in their book Confronting Suburban Poverty in America. Between 2000 and 2010 the number of people living below the federal poverty line ($22,314 for a family of four in 2010) in the suburbs grew by 53%, compared with just 23% in cities. In 2010 roughly 15.3m poor people lived in the suburbs, compared with 12.8m in cities (see chart). *Suburban poverty began to rise before the recession.* As American cities have grown safer and richer, homes there have become less affordable. During the subprime bubble, many people with bad credit scores got mortgages and moved to the suburbs. A shift towards housing vouchers and away from massive urban projects encouraged people in subsidised housing to make the same move. Immigrants, too, chased the American dream of neat lawns and picket fences. Now 51% of immigrants (who are more likely than the native-born to be poor) live in suburbs, compared with just 33% in cities. When the bubble burst, the suburbs suffered. Construction and manufacturing, two of the most suburban industries, lost more jobs between 2007 and 2010 than any other sector. Nowhere is it easy to be poor, but the suburbs present particular difficulties. Consider Cobb County, where Kim and Melissa live. Atlantas commuter-rail system, MARTA, does not run to Cobb. That leaves the carless, such as Kim, or those who have a car but worry about the cost of petrol, like Melissa, dependent on the bus. But Cobbs bus network bypasses much of the county and does not run on Sundays. During non-rush hours, service is spotty; during rush hours, the traffic is awful. So relying on buses can easily add two or three hours to an eight-hour day. Rents have been rising, says Kate Tettamant, a CFR case manager; some of her clients spend half their income on rent. Flexible child careessential if you are working odd hoursis also hard to find. One might wonder why the suburban poor do not simply pack up and move back to the cities. Many remain in the suburbs for the same reasons others do: safety, better schools and cheaper homes. And increasingly, suburbia is where the jobs are: between 2000 and 2010 the number of jobs within three miles of central business districts in Americas 100 biggest cities fell by 10.4%, while the number of jobs 10-35 miles away rose by 1.2%. But while suburban jobs and suburban poverty are both growing, Americas anti-poverty infrastructure lags. Suburban safety nets can be thin and patchy; grant-making organisations are often used to focusing on urban rather than suburban poverty. Just as many of the suburban poor have never experienced poverty before, so many of the organisations that help the poor have been overwhelmed by the rapid rise in numbers, says Lesley Grady, a vice-president of the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, a charity. Unlike cities, too, suburbs are not politically cohesive entities: they shift, expand and cut across boundaries. Metropolitan Atlanta, for instance, comprises nearly 30 counties, each with its own government, laws and regulations. To be effective, aid organisations must find a way to co-ordinate across those political boundaries. Doing so will not be easy: governments do not easily cede or share power. But for the sake of Kim, Melissa and millions like them, America will have to try. http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21582019-poverty-has-moved-suburbs-broke-burbs JAI RAC-LA [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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