How the Suburbs Got Poor?
5th October 2014
Yet another analysis of why suburbs suck by somebody who has never lived in a suburb.
You might be wondering why poor families are moving to the suburbs in large numbers—the number of suburban poor grew more than twice as quickly as the number of urban poor between 2000 and 2011—if they are such hard places for poor people to get ahead. Part of it is that as middle- and high-income households moved to the suburbs, the low-wage workers who look after their children had little choice but to follow. Then there is the fact that as America’s most productive cities experience a revival, gentrification is displacing low-income families to outlying neighborhoods and towns.
Note the assumption that anybody who is not already ‘low-income’ necessarily has ‘low-income’ people ‘who look after their children’. Bzzt! Wrong. The people who have low-income people to look after their kids are the Crustian professionals who both have professional jobs and rarely have more than one kid in the first place; this author’s view of ‘suburb’ means Scarsdale or Darien, not Ferguson.