As Suburban Poverty Grows, U.S. Fails to Respond Adequately

[marmar]

from the Next American City blog:



With all the hullabaloo over Google’s new invention—a car that can drive itself on regular streets—you’d think that America’s favorite company had found the solution for the world’s transportation dilemmas. There’s something magical about the idea that it is possible to replace other modes of transport with individual pods, speeding through traffic directly to and from one’s preferred destination.

This fantasy, however, does little for the growing ranks of impoverished people in a country that has been hit severely by the recession and whose unemployment and underemployment problems are far from being resolved soon. According to the Census Bureau, 14.3% of the nation’s population lived under the poverty line in 2009, representing 43.6 million individuals. With the cost of automobile ownership taking a huge chunk out of typical family incomes, transportation—specifically car-based mobility—represents a significant drain on peoples’ resources.

Efficient public transportation could provide a realistic solution for those problems, but the demographics of the newly poor suggest that transit is not a realistic option for a majority of those in poverty, because more and more of them live outside of city centers. A series of new reports from the Brookings Institution illustrates this fact dramatically.

Over the last ten years, more than two-thirds of poverty growth in the nation’s metro areas occurred in the suburbs, and there are now 1.6 million more poor people living in the suburbs than in center cities. Since 2000, there has been a general increase in the nation’s poverty rate, but it has been far worse in the suburbs than in the cities—a 37.4% increase versus 16.7%. Though the poverty rate remains higher in central cities, the number of poor suburbanites is growing quickly. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://americancity.org/columns/entry/2670/

[bemildred]

1. Come come, we haven't even tried yet. nt

[Warpy]

2. Transportation is really the key

and transportation even in close suburbs is generally a joke, buses only every half hour to hour and often more than a mile to find a stop. Then the buses all go to either the outermost subway station or to a hub in the center of town. If one doesn't work in the center of town, an equal commute the other way to one's job is in order. A 2-3 hour commute isn't out of the question for people who live in one burb and work in another.

When your car has been taken by the repo man, you're just plain stuck if you live in the burbs. Being poor there is much worse than being poor in the city because you're isolated by distance and lack of services.

And the country has done nothing about it.