Implications of Suburban Poverty on Keeping Youth Connected

Elizabeth Kneebone

I knew that poverty was growing in the suburbs. But I was still shocked to read the article Poverty Comes to Wisteria Lane (originally published in U.S. Catholic magazine and republished in UTNE Reader).  The author claims that there are three million more impoverished residents in the suburbs than there are in big cities. I couldn’t put my head around this fact until I checked out Elizabeth Kneebone’s research at the Brookings Institute.

According to a post by Kneebone and her colleague Jane Williams,

“Within the nation’s largest metro areas, suburbs remained home to 55 percent of poor residents in 2012. The poor population in cities ticked up by just over one percent between 2011 and 2012, while the suburban poor population held statistically steady. Both city and suburban poverty rates (21.7 and 12.1, respectively) remained unchanged from 2011, and suburbs continued to house 3 million more poor residents than their primary cities.”

There is greater concentration of poverty in big cities, and this concentration, of course, creates a set of community dynamics. However, the number of people that are poor is much more distributed than I had understood. The suburbs are also home to a high percentage of poor residents, which asks us to examine the dynamics and consequences in the youth field.  

We need to find out if kids growing up in suburbs with hopefully better schools and better labor market networks need as much help as kids growing up in concentrated areas of poverty.  It is possible that when there isn’t enough food on the table it’s just as difficult for kids living in poverty in suburban areas to complete high school or make the transition to college. Those are challenges that make starting a career just as hard.  Perhaps we need to consider different types of services and interventions in these locations to support the transition from high school to college to career.

It is important to get an understanding of the racial dynamics at play in suburban areas to give us some ideas of what to expect in suburban poverty.  We may see the same interplay between race and class in the suburbs as in big cities. I am curious to know if the suburban poor are also more likely to be families of color?  This requires us to look at the interplay between systems and the racial patterns within it.  Is the school-to-prison pipeline growing in suburbs with the same disproportionate response to youth of color as in cities? Perhaps there is a different set of characteristics in the suburbs? As families struggle with poverty in these locations, is child welfare placing children in foster care or do extended family networks have more capacity to support their kin in the suburbs?

From there we might want to consider how funding is organized and distributed in the suburbs. According to the Kneebone article, demand for social services in the suburban areas is outstripping supply. One service agency had to turn away 25 percent of people seeking aid. 

We don’t want to reduce services to big cities. When I worked with the Massachusetts Jobs Council long ago, the middle class experienced labor market dislocation and many middle managers lost their jobs. Consequently funds were taken from low-income areas and redistributed to more middle-class communities without thinking through the implications or finding more creative ways to respond.  The last thing I’d want to see is Congress saying we must respond to suburban poverty by taking a chunk of resources away from big cities.  This is not the most effective solution.

I’d suggest we begin by considering regional or countywide efforts rather than city-defined services in distributing youth programming.  I’d also explore integrating services into school districts and community colleges rather than depending on community-based organizations to fill the need alone.  There could actually be some benefits in creating more regional eduployment programs. Non-profits could thus tap into broader sets of employers.  My last thought—we’d need to engage community-organizing groups, especially interfaith ones, as they often stretch beyond a single city or community. I’m sure they would see new opportunities and ways to respond that wouldn’t necessarily create winners and losers.

I wonder the extent to which foundations have been rethinking their funding strategies given the changing dynamics of poverty?  I’ve only seen a few examples of foundations working with suburban communities and haven’t read of any making announcements that their strategies are being modified to better address suburban poverty. One example is the Road Map Project in King County, Washington, a collective impact model including the Auburn, Federal Way, Highline, Kent, Renton, Seattle, and Tukwila school districts.  It’s hard to get the level of collaboration in collective impact models in one city and one district, let alone seven. However, when you look at the area and the distribution of community, education and employer resources it does make sense to focus on the southern part of the Seattle-metro area.

I can see why foundations might feel resistant to broadening funding to include suburbs; budgets will feel increasingly small as competition for resources grow.  It will also take even more work to build relationships with the grassroots and grasstop leaders that are required to make good investments with these funds. However, for those foundations frustrated by districts and cities focused on problems rather than solutions or sinking in non-productive political dynamics, investing in the neighboring suburbs might be a way to create some competition and build the local capacity needed to bring about change.  In fact, in smaller cities usually fewer people have to come to an agreement making collaborative innovation a bit easier. It’s possible that we can invest in more innovation in suburban communities and if these innovations work we can use these methods to address challenges in big cities.

One last thought – with poverty no longer being a question of urban/rural, are there new opportunities to build political will for expanding eduployment services?