More Americans now live in poverty in suburbs than in cities, a somewhat surprising shift that the Brookings Institution says “signals the latest stage in the long-run decentralization of people and jobs in the United States.”
In a report released two weeks ago, Brookings found that while the number of urban and suburban poor in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas was about even in 1999, by 2005 the suburbs, with 12.2 million residents, contained about 1.2 million more people in poverty than central cities did. In the AP story that broke the news, Alan Berube, the report’s co-author, said that the faster-growing populations of the suburbs, their increasing racial and economic diversification, and recent immigrants who “are increasingly bypassing cities and moving directly to suburbs, especially in the South and West” were reasons for the shift.
But though the report strikes us as precisely the kind of peg that reporters often require — especially to write about poverty — it has not been well covered by the press. NPR is the only national outlet to have run a substantial piece on it.
Part of the reason could be that Brookings didn’t push it on the national press. “We originally viewed this as a story about cities and suburbs, and not necessarily a big national story,” Berube says. “We didn’t try to do a hard sell to the big national news outlets on this.”
Meantime, small and mid-sized papers across the country from Cincinnati to Modesto, Calif. have reported the story, with middling results. The Memphis Commercial Appeal‘s effort got lost in a thicket of numbers, and while its peers produced better articles, few went in much depth beyond the numbers. The Plain Dealer ran an attention-grabbing lede — “The number of poor people in the suburbs of Cleveland is growing faster than in almost any other big city in America” — but then quoted only Berube and one local nonprofit director in its story. In Baton Rouge the Advocate went a little farther, talking with Berube and two executive directors who serve those in poverty, while in Modesto the Bee gave a more interesting backstory, via public policy types, for why California’s Central Valley claims some of the poorest suburbs in the nation. (We should note here that large cities’ poverty rate of 18.8 percent is still double that found in suburbs, with poverty defined as an income of $19,806 or less for a family of four in 2005.)
Poverty stories are a tough sell in today’s MSM, so the fact that these papers chose to report the story at all is positive. “The run of the news now pretty much ignores poverty because government is not involved in making it an issue by trying to address it, and that means it doesn’t get covered. And it’s not on the radar scope of most editors,” says David Shipler, a former longtime New York Times reporter and author of The Working Poor: Invisible in America. “You don’t get a lot of breaking news on the subject, so it’s hard to get stories into the paper. So when you have breaking stories like this, it’s a great hook.”
But the Brookings-inspired stories have also missed a lot. The Oregonian article, for example, was notable because it focused (however briefly) on an actual poor person, a 23-year-old mom visiting a food pantry for the first time. The Brookings study also found that in those “cities and suburbs where overall poverty rates rose from 1999 to 2005, child poverty rates rose faster”; that finding has received little attention, while no reporter appears to have talked with children. By and large the stories have not been about people, and thus have lacked vibrancy.
Yet there was one story that made the subject come alive more than the others: a thoughtful piece from the Greensboro News & Record which reported that its area’s spike in suburban poverty “is the worst fallout yet from the region’s battle with continual textile layoffs and a slow economic recovery. It underscores the fact that manufacturing built the region’s small communities and that its loss is now squeezing the people who want to stay and build new lives.”
The News & Record‘s skillfully written piece best explained why suburban poverty has risen in its area, and several closely observed, on-the-mark quotes (“We’ve got more and more of the character or the symptoms of a ‘have not’ county, and I think that’s a hard thing to come to grips with”) brought the issue home — but if it had included a few of the stories of those Piedmont Triad residents struggling with poverty, it would have been even better.
And there are plenty more stories tied to the Brookings hook that can still be reported in the coming weeks. CBS 11 News out of Dallas-Fort Worth aired a profile of a young, well-dressed mother of four (resembling a star of ER) from a well-off suburb who has, surprisingly, recently had a “fast and painful tumble into poverty.” Given the numbers, she is not alone.
Berube says there hasn’t “been a lot of good reporting about how suburban poverty looks different or looks the same from urban poverty,” and suggests that the press could do more with comparisons of the types of neighborhoods, housing, and family structure that are characteristic of urban and suburban poverty. For example, Paul Jargowsky, an associate professor of political economy at UT-Dallas who has written extensively on the concentration of poverty, wonders how it makes a difference to be poor in the suburbs. Families might be able to avoid crime and drugs more easily and have their kids attend better schools, he says, but support services for the poor are still mostly centralized. “They might feel more isolated and maybe they’re not accepted by the members of their community,” Jargowsky says of the suburban poor.
Sounds like a good story to us.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.