Poverty is moving to the suburbs. The war on poverty hasn’t followed. – The Washington Post
Wealthier, whiter areas also have experienced rising suburban poverty. Montgomery County, among the wealthiest counties in the country, had the region’s largest increase in poverty between 2007 and 2010, when the census showed for the first time that it was no longer majority-white. In Charles County, Md., which has a median family income of $98,560, the poverty rate more than doubled between 2007 and 2015. And according to Elizabeth Kneebone, a researcher at Brookings and the University of California and co-author of “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America,” the jurisdictions that experienced the region’s biggest increases in poverty last decade were farther-flung parts of Virginia, such as Prince William County and Loudoun County — the wealthiest county in America.
The shifting geography of poverty has left the nonprofit organizations that work to alleviate it scrambling to keep up. Another Brookings report showed that nonprofit spending per poor resident was significantly higher in D.C. and the counties that are home to Chicago and Los Angeles than in surrounding suburbs. In all three metropolitan areas, there were fewer organizations helping low-income suburbanites, and they had to stretch their services over much larger geographical areas than nonprofit groups in cities. In 2011, Kneebone and her colleagues found that nonprofit organizations in the District, Arlington and Alexandria had a combined budget of $9,996 per poor resident. In the other D.C. suburbs, that figure was just $945.
Poor people who leave the city face new disadvantages. Where they grew up, they tended to be familiar with housing, job-training and food-assistance programs. If they weren’t, they could turn to neighbors for guidance. “When people are in new neighborhoods, new counties, that sort of community knowledge that’s been built up is lost,” said Benjamin Orr, executive director of the nonprofit Maryland Center on Economic Policy. “And you have to start from scratch again.”
