Despite claims of a downtown population boom, the reality is that every demographic group is growing faster in the suburbs than the cities–and that includes poor people. According to an L.A. Times report on a new book from Brookings, between 2000 and 2011, the number of poor people living in suburbs grew by 67 percent and now outnumber poor people living in cities.
This is supposed to be a problem because antipoverty agencies are “unprepared to meet the need in suburban areas.” This being Brookings, one of the remedies is supposed to be “more (and better) transportation options” (meaning public transit) in the suburbs. But this begs the question: if antipoverty agencies and public transit are so critical to poor people, why did so many poor people move to the suburbs in the first place? The answer, of course, is that they aren’t that helpful.
Meanwhile, a report from Australia suggests that one reason why low-income populations are growing in the suburbs is that wealthy and upper-middle-class people are crowding poor people out of the inner cities. This is certainly the situation in many American urban areas, such as San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. This, of course, is what the cities wanted: to lure the high-taxpaying people away from the suburbs. In many cases, however, the way they are doing it is not by making the cities attractive to the rich but by making them unaffordable for the poor.
