more Americans are now living below the poverty line in suburbs than in cities (since 2000)

[underpants]

But that image may no longer be apt: As several recent reports have stressed, more Americans are now living below the poverty line in suburbs than in cities. And thanks in part to the Great Recession, suburban poverty continues to rise sharply. What's more, many suburbs may not be as well set up as urban areas are to provide much-needed social services. Researchers fear that porous suburban safety nets are leaving a growing number of struggling Americans without access to the basic assistance they need to get them through hard times.

As recently as 2000, more poor Americans were living in cities than in suburbs. But since then, according to a report released earlier this year by Kneebone and a Brookings colleague, Emily Garr, the ranks of the suburban poor have grown by 37 percent — more than twice the rate that poverty increased in the nation's cities. As a result, although the poverty rate remains higher in cities, by last year 1.6 million more poor people were in suburbs than in cities.

This trend was under way before the economic downturn began in late 2007 — but researchers say that the Great Recession appears to have exacerbated it. "This recession has had an economic effect on suburbs that past recessions haven't," says Scott Allard, an expert on poverty and social welfare at the University of Chicago. "This is the first time suburbs have experienced significant levels of job losses."

More fundamentally, observers say, many suburbs, whose residents have in the past been disproportionately affluent, simply aren't set up to serve the poor. As Allard and Roth found, most suburban communities lack the kind of social service programs commonly found in urban areas, which have been grappling with poverty for decades. And some suburban nonprofits have trouble raising money from donors, because of the perception that poverty is predominantly an urban ill.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20101026/us_yblog_upshot/new-poverty-hotspot-the-suburbs

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