ABSTRACT
America’s suburban communities have been racially and economically diverse since their emergence and growth in the twentieth century (Farley 1964, Logan and Schneider 1981, Wiese 1999, Pitti 2003) but historically have not experienced high rates of concentrated poverty present in many central city areas. Research on poverty in the twentieth century, therefore, has tended to focus on the loss of well-paying jobs, flight of middle-class residents, increase in crime rates, and greater race and class segregation in urban areas (Wilson 1987, Danziger and Gottschalk 1993, Massey and Denton 1993, Gottschalk and Danziger 2005). In the past decade, however, the geography of poverty has decidedly shifted to many suburbs. Across the largest U.S. metropolitan areas in 1999 there was, on average, an even balance of poor people in suburbs and central cities, but by 2005 the number of poor people living in the suburbs of these metropolitan areas surpassed the number of poor in their companion central cities by over 1 million (Berube and Kneebone 2006). The number of suburban poor has continued to grow nearly five times faster than the number of central city poor from 2005 to 2009. Central city residents are still more likely to be poor than their suburban counterparts, but as of 2009, 1.6 million more poor people lived in suburbs (13.7 million) than in central cities (12.1 million) of the largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. (Kneebone 2010, Kneebone and Garr 2010b).
