Thursday, October 07, 2010
Poverty Grows in Suburbs, but Social Services Don’t Keep Up
Poverty has grown in America’s suburbs during the recent economic downturn, but poor people in many suburban communities are finding it hard to get the help they need, a report by University of Chicago researchers shows.
“Many suburbs have seen significant expansion in the number of poor persons over the last several years, yet few of the suburban communities have a social services infrastructure in place to address the challenges this increased poverty poses,” said Scott Allard, Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University.
Allard and Benjamin Roth, a graduate student at SSA, are the authors of a report, “Suburbs in Need: Rising Suburban Poverty and Challenges for Suburban Safety Nets,” prepared for the Brookings Institution, to be released Thursday, Oct. 7. For the study, the researchers examined census data, records from the Internal Revenue Service and interviewed representatives of social service agencies in suburban Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
The authors focused on these specific metropolitan areas because they provide a diverse set of suburban communities with different levels of poverty and social service support. Focusing on three metro areas also allowed the authors to follow a large set of nonprofit service providers over the course of a year. The experiences of low-income people in the suburbs of these three metro areas are quite similar to the experiences of low-income people in other suburban areas across the country, Allard said.
The study is one of the first comprehensive looks at suburban safety nets and poverty during the recession. The majority of poverty research focuses on concentrated urban poverty.
RSS