Suburban poverty increasing in Greater Chicago

Higher rate in 2010

Jon Boyd, Aug 29, 10.

Suburban areas accounted for 48.1 percent of metropolitan poverty in 2008, according to a story from Chicagoland:

Carolina Duque has no shortage of clients at her social services agency. As the executive director of Mano a Mano Family Resource Center, she’s seen the number of people served by the agency increase sevenfold in the last eight years, from 500 clients in 2001 to 3,500 in 2009. “We’re a small agency, so there’s only so much we can do,” Duque says. Yet her organization’s dynamism and can-do attitude are apparent from the building’s exterior — the front of the simple beige structure is splashed with a colorful mural of a tree and a sun — as well as from the popularity of what goes on inside: Most of the programs have a waiting list.

It’s not surprising that a social services agency’s offerings are consistently, and increasingly, in demand. Consider one of the findings of a 2006 Brookings Institution report by Alan Berube and Elizabeth Kneebone: “Each year between 2000 and 2004, the proportion of the U.S. population living below the poverty line — equivalent to an income of $15,753 for a family of three in 2005 — rose. It leveled off in 2005, such that 38 million U.S. residents lived in poverty that year, up from 34 million in 1999.” And this was before the recession.

What might come as a surprise, however, is the changing geography of poverty in America. The Mano a Mano Family Resource Center isn’t in an urban setting, the traditional location of low-income families. Rather, it finds its large client base and lengthy waiting lists among the rapidly increasing Latino population in suburban Round Lake, Ill., in Lake County, about an hour and a half northwest of Chicago.

Berube and Kneebone’s report Two Steps Back: City and Suburban Poverty Trends 1999-2005 concludes that although cities and suburbs have both experienced rising poverty rates, growing numbers of poor people have been migrating to suburbs. A follow-up report released early this year, The Suburbanization of Poverty: Trends in Metropolitan America, by Kneebone and Emily Garr, found the trend continuing, and exacerbated by the economic downturn. While the percentage of poor people in large cities was still about twice as high as in the suburbs, when it comes to sheer numbers of low-income people, the suburbs actually began overtaking cities several years ago. “By 2008,” the authors of the recent report write, “suburbs were home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country. Between 2000 and 2008, suburbs in the country’s largest metro areas saw their poor population grow by 25 percent — almost five times faster than primary cities.” This demographic tilt translates to large suburbs being home to 1.5 million more poor people than their primary cities.

Read the 2010 Brooking update: The Suburbanization of Poverty: Trends in Metropolitan America, 2000 to 2008
(Photo credit: Mark Strozier, Flickr Creative Commons)