CONFRONTING SUBURBAN POVERTY IN AMERICA

By Elizabeth Kneebone, Alan Berube

Brookings Institution Press

Copyright © 2013 THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8157-2390-5

Contents

Foreword Luis A. Ubiñas, President, Ford Foundation…………………..viiAcknowledgments……………………………………………………xi1 Poverty and the Suburbs: An Introduction……………………………12 Suburban Poverty, by the Numbers…………………………………..133 Behind the Numbers: What’s Driving Suburban Poverty?…………………374 The Implications of Suburban Poverty……………………………….555 Fighting Today’s Poverty with Yesterday’s Policies…………………..776 Innovating Locally to Confront Suburban Poverty……………………..967 Modernizing the Metropolitan Opportunity Agenda……………………..113Notes…………………………………………………………….145Index…………………………………………………………….161

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Poverty and the Suburbs:An Introduction

Drive about forty-five miles east of San Francisco, tracing a route acrossthe Bay Bridge, through the Caldecott Tunnel outside Oakland, past thewealthy suburbs of central Contra Costa County, and along the CaliforniaDelta Highway that eventually leads to the state’s Central Valley. Thereyou find a series of communities in transition—from industrial cities tobedroom suburbs, from agricultural lands to residential havens, and fromoutposts of the middle class to symbols of modern American poverty.

In the 2000s, the number of people living in poverty in East ContraCosta County (“East County”) grew by more than 70 percent—a rapidincrease for these relatively small places, but not an isolated one. FromCleveland’s long-struggling inner suburbs, to the immigrant portalssouth of Seattle, to aging communities surrounding Chicago, or the traditionallyaffluent Maryland suburbs of the nation’s capital—almostevery major metropolitan area in the country has experienced risingpoverty beyond its urban core. Despite the fact that “poverty in America”still conjures images of inner-city slums, the suburbanization ofpoverty has redrawn the contemporary American landscape. Afterdecades of growth and change in suburbs, coupled with long-term economicrestructuring and punctuated by the deepest U.S. economicdownturn in seventy years, today more Americans live below thepoverty line in suburbs than in the nation’s big cities.

Changing populations and shifting economics characterize the experienceof suburban communities in East County. These places, which AlexSchafran dubs “Cities of Carquinez” after the nearby Carquinez Strait,were established in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Refineries, factories,mills, working ports, and train and ferry depots dotted the smallcities of Pittsburg and Antioch, and unincorporated Bay Point, a centuryago. Victorian and Craftsman homes still line the older streets in theportions of these communities near the coastline. Further inland, boomtownslike Brentwood and Oakley retain visible vestiges of their recentagricultural past, when they were western outposts of California’s CentralValley rather than eastern suburbs of the Bay Area.

As the Bay Area economy grew and changed in the late twentieth century,however, these East County cities began to shed their farming andindustrial character, and exploded in population and new single-familysuburban development. The boom was especially rapid in the early tomid-2000s, as a run-up in real estate values in closer-in Bay Area communitiesmade many of these cities an “escape valve” for “drive ’til youqualify” middle-class families seeking affordable homeownership. Whiletheir economic heritage meant that these cities had long been home todiverse working-class populations, they also experienced a visible influxof new black and Hispanic residents during this period, most of whomcommuted long distances back into the region’s core each day for work.

Even amid the relative boom of the early to mid-2000s, broader economicshifts saw the typical household’s income in these communitiesstagnate or fall and the poor population grow, as more residents madetheir living in quickly growing but lower-wage industries like construction,retail, and hospitality. When the housing market crashed in 2006,however, the economic bottom fell out of East County. Constructionworkers lost jobs. Families lost wage earners and found themselves slippingdown the economic ladder. The subregion became the unofficialforeclosure capital of the Bay Area. At the same time, property investorsunable to sell newly built homes recruited low-income renters withgovernment-issued housing vouchers, which gave rise to new communitytensions. Local fiscal coffers that relied heavily on property taxes tooka beating, even as demand for services skyrocketed. Whereas the poorpopulation had grown more slowly in the earlier part of the decade, thenumber of people below the poverty line in these relatively small communitiesrose by nearly 10,000 in the span of just three years—doublethe increase of the early to mid-2000s.

Not only did these challenges far outstrip the capacity of a strainedlocal public sector, but they also overwhelmed the area’s extremely thinnonprofit safety net. Small, local job training organizations could notkeep pace with the demand from a burgeoning unemployed population.Foreclosure counselors were in short supply. Most philanthropic dollarsin the region remained tethered to historically poor communities inOakland, San Francisco, or other big cities. Compounding the challenge,the Cities of Carquinez were literally at the “end of the line” inthe Bay Area, lacking proximity and transportation options that mighthelp their residents access needed services.

While those eastern Bay Area communities have faced dramaticchanges in recent years, their situation mirrors that of an increasingnumber of suburbs across the United States. This book explores thecomplicated changes occurring in suburban communities that for severaldecades defined the middle-class American dream. Why is poverty onthe rise there? What are the consequences for those places and their residents?And what, if anything, should society do about it?

Poverty is a relatively new phenomenon in many suburbs, at least atthese levels. As such, it upends deeply fixed notions of where povertyoccurs and whom it affects. As poverty becomes increasingly regional inits scope and reach, it challenges conventional approaches that thenation has taken when dealing with poverty in place.

Many of those approaches were shaped when President Lyndon B.Johnson declared a national War on Poverty in 1964. At that time, poorAmericans were most likely to live in inner-city neighborhoods orsparsely populated rural areas. Fifty years later, public perception stilllargely casts poverty as an urban or rural phenomenon. Poverty rates doremain higher in cities and rural communities than elsewhere. But forthree decades the poor population has grown fastest in suburbs. Theespecially rapid pace of growth in the 2000s saw suburbs ultimately outstripother types of communities so that they now account for thelargest poor population in the country. More types of people and placesare being touched by economic hardship than in the past, includingthose that may have once seemed immune to such challenges.

The changing map of American poverty matters because place matters.It starts with the metropolitan areas, the regional economies thatcut across city and suburban lines and drive the national economy. Placeintersects with core policy issues central to the long-term health and stabilityof metropolitan areas and to the economic success of individualsand families—things like housing, transportation, economic and workforcedevelopment, and the provision of education, health, and otherbasic services. Where people live influences the kinds of educational andeconomic opportunities and the range of public services available tothem, as well as what barriers to accessing those opportunities mayexist. The country’s deep history of localism means that, within thesame metropolitan area, a resident of one community will not necessarilyhave the same access to good jobs and quality schools, or even basichealth and safety services, as a person in another community, whetheracross the region or right next door.

Poverty’s Historic Homes

For decades, experts have framed the debate around the intersection ofpoverty and place largely in an urban or rural context—for instance, thenegative effects of living in an inner-city ghetto or barrio, or the challengesof rural isolation. Poverty rates in these types of communitiesremain much higher than for the nation as a whole, and for decades theseareas have been home to significant portions of the nation’s poor, givingrise to an extensive literature that documents the trends and impacts ofdeep and entrenched poverty in both urban and rural America.

The problems of inner cities received wide attention beginning in the1960s. In Tally’s Corner, ethnographer Elliot Liebow documented thelives of the urban poor in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C.Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former assistant secretary of labor, issued acontroversial report on black poverty arguing that “ghetto culture” andthe decline of the nuclear family led to economic hardship. Ken Auletta,Nicholas Lemann, and others followed with portraits of urban “underclass”communities in the 1980s suffering from violent crime, out-of-wedlockchildbearing, and eventually the crack cocaine epidemic. Muchof this work focused on how the behaviors of poor residents contributedto the deep challenges facing their neighborhoods.

In the 1980s and 1990s, scholar William Julius Wilson posited thatstructural factors—including the decline of manufacturing jobs forlower-skilled city workers—led to a rise in joblessness that increasedpoverty and ultimately affected cultural norms and behaviors in decliningurban neighborhoods. He also argued that growing concentrationsof poverty in predominantly minority, inner-city areas undermined communityinstitutions and networks formerly maintained by middle-classand working-class families, and removed positive role models for children,helping to perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Douglas Massey andNancy Denton explored how the legacy of racial segregation shapedcontemporary urban poverty in the early 1990s.

Paul Jargowsky and others went on to document trends in concentratedpoverty across the country, finding the largest concentrations ofthe poor in inner-city neighborhoods with much higher shares of minorities,single mothers, high school dropouts, and working-age men outsidethe labor force than in areas with less poverty. Others, includingGeorge Galster, examined the thresholds at which concentrations ofpoverty led to appreciable negative effects on residents, neighborhoods,and the larger region that housed them, including poorer health andeducational outcomes, increased crime, and falling property values.

In a parallel vein over this same time period, rural poverty expertsexplored the persistence and depth of poverty in the nation’s wide-rangingand far-flung rural communities. These explorations focused on structuralfactors in the community as well as individual characteristics of thepoor, including the decline of traditional industries, out-migration, andlow educational levels. Janet Fitchen chronicled the persistence of generationalpoverty in rural households in upstate New York, finding thatcontemporary families were unable to adapt to economic shifts towardmodern agriculture. Looking at Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta,Cynthia Duncan found that places with greater evidence of multigenerationalpoverty were also home to social structures that isolated peoplewith lower incomes from better-off residents, inhibiting social mobility.Regardless of the mechanisms at play, poverty in rural communities andacross generations has proven a seemingly intractable, and in fact growing,issue. Children in rural areas today are more likely than a generationago to live in communities plagued by persistently high povertyover decades.

The Dawn of the Modern Suburb

In contrast, suburbs have traditionally inhabited a very different popularnarrative in American culture, one in which poverty generally doesnot feature (except perhaps to the extent that the rise of the suburbssignaled—and even contributed to—urban decline). In many ways, suburbshave been central to the particular brand of the American dreamthat developed rapidly after World War II. Moving to suburbia signaleda step up—a house with a yard, a car to drive to work, good schools,and safe streets. As Bernadette Hanlon and her colleagues noted:

The very pursuit of happiness in post-war history was synonymouswith the suburbs. A move to the suburbs symbolized many thingsin the American context. It was a move of social and economicmobility: a path that led away from the nation’s ailing centralcities and to the emergent suburban frontier. The American Dreamwas realized in the nation’s nascent suburbs.

Perhaps most emblematic of the fast-growing suburban communitiesthat multiplied in the postwar era were the developments built by AbrahamLevitt and his sons William and Alfred. In the Levittowns built onLong Island, and outside Philadelphia (in Bucks County, Pennsylvania,and Willingboro, New Jersey), Levitt and Sons honed their approach tosuburban development, using a standardized housing design, preassembledparts, and vertical integration of suppliers to speed production.Regarding these cookie-cutter Cape Cods with a living room, a bathroom,two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a yard, Kenneth Jackson observed, “Thisearly Levitt house was as basic to post World War II suburban developmentas the Model T had been to the automobile. In each case, the actualdesign features were less important than the fact that they were mass-producedand thus priced within reach of the middle class.” Jackson alsonoted that while Levitt did not invent many of the techniques heemployed, the wide publicity of his developments served to popularize hisapproach. Large builders in metropolitan areas throughout the country—includingdevelopers in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Houston,Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Washington—adopted similarmethods.

The rapid build-out of the suburbs in that period reflected both thepull of and the push toward suburbia. William Lucy and David Phillipsobserved that “individual preferences provided the motivation, anddevelopment institutions and policies … provided the means” thatdrove suburban growth, often led by affluent households. Aging anddeclining urban infrastructure, pollution, poor schools, and perceptionsof rising crime in central cities, coupled with the promise of new, single-familyhomes, clean air, and green spaces, made the burgeoning suburbsall the more desirable. The draw of the suburbs reached across classlines, yet affluent households—especially those headed by middle- andupper-class whites—were able to act on those preferences more readily,particularly when aided by policies and institutions that paved the way(sometimes literally) for the move to the suburbs.

The “means” Lucy and Phillips refer to came from an array of programsand policies that enabled and encouraged large-scale suburbanization.According to Kevin Kruse and Thomas Sugrue:

Public policies, including federal housing and economic developmentsubsidies, state and local land-use policies and environmentalregulations, locally administered services and taxation policies, andlocally controlled schools, all inexorably shaped the process of suburbanizationin the postwar period. The division of metropolitanareas by race and class, a division that was reified and reinforcedthrough the drawing of hard municipal boundaries, created a distinctform of spatialized inequality in the modern United States.

At the federal level, a range of programs and policies contributed torapid suburbanization in this period, whether by encouraging and easingthe way to homeownership or heavily subsidizing the roads and sewersneeded to support “greenfield” development at the urban fringe.For prospective home buyers, insured mortgages through the FederalHousing Administration (FHA) and the GI Bill’s Veterans Affairs (VA)mortgage program freed up the flow of private capital for home loans.Further subsidies for homeowners came in the form of federal taxbreaks, like the home mortgage interest deduction. The Federal-AidHighway Act of 1956, which covered 90 percent of the cost of highwayconstruction, set in motion the rapid development of the interstate highwaysystem that not only connected major regions across the countrybut enabled suburban development to extend deeper into the countrysidewith the promise of easier commutes for would-be suburbanites.In that same year, Congress enacted legislation to subsidize more thanhalf the cost of new sewer treatment facilities, further facilitating thedevelopment of the infrastructure needed to support suburban growth.

As these federal investments drove the widespread suburbanization ofa predominantly white middle class, other people and places faced disinvestment.For instance, the tax code provided an open-ended subsidy forhomeowners but allowed no parallel housing benefit for renters. Forhomeowners, the most favorable home loans went to new construction,while loans for improvements or rehabilitation were smaller and givenfor shorter durations. All of these factors favored suburban developmentover central cities. Moreover, federal loan insurance programs essentiallycodified the private market’s practice of redlining, curtailing lending toinner cities and minorities. From 1945 to 1959, approximately 90 percentof all FHA and VA mortgages were for suburban homes, yet fewerthan 2 percent went to African Americans. At the same time, federalinvestments in roads enabled the rise of the auto-dependent suburbsrather than encouraging denser development around mass transit.Andres Duany and his colleagues observed that the nation’s suburbanexpansion lacked “incentives to integrate different housing types orincomes among the new construction. In a sense our government did halfits job: it provided the means to escape the city—highways and cheaphome loans—while neglecting to allocate those means fairly.”
(Continues…)Excerpted from CONFRONTING SUBURBAN POVERTY IN AMERICA by Elizabeth Kneebone. Copyright © 2013 by THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION. Excerpted by permission of Brookings Institution Press.
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