Just when you
think you finally are beginning to understand the issues you’ve worked on for
much your career, new research comes along that turns everything you thought you
knew upside down and serves as powerful reminder to look beyond conventional
wisdom. That was the experience I had while preparing to keynote a Brookings
Institution session last week on suburban poverty.
The occasion was
the publication of an important new book by Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube
called Confronting Suburban Poverty in America.
@ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/opinion/cul-de-sac-poverty.html?hp&_r=0
Most of us have mental images of poverty
concentrated in urban areas and hard to reach rural communities. But what the
authors found is that one in three poor
Americans now live in the suburbs and that the pace has been growing so fast
that in a number of regions- like Chicago, Houston, Seattle - the rates of poverty in the suburbs are now
actually greater than the rates of poverty in the city.
But the authors
also found that anti-poverty programs haven’t evolved accordingly. “Policies to
help poor places – as opposed to poor people – haven’t evolved much beyond the
War On Poverty’s neighborhood-based solutions.”
Federal programs designed for urban areas, ranging from Community Health
Centers to Promise Neighborhoods – are ill-suited for suburbs where poverty is
more diffuse and services scattered.
Americans living
in poverty have always found themselves to be vulnerable, voiceless, and often
invisible to policymakers. As poverty has dissipated from our cities to our
suburbs that has become even more the case. Kneebone and Berube have written an
original and important book that gives voice to their needs.
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