Redefining Urban and Suburban America: Evidence from Census 2000

A Decade of Mixed Blessings: Urban and Suburban Poverty in Census 2000

The 1990s was a decade of unprecedented economic growth in the United States. Real GDP grew at a blistering 4.3 percent annual pace from 1992 to 2000. The unemployment rate at the time of Census 2000 was 3.9 percent, the lowest in a generation. In the late 1990s the strong economy helped move millions of individuals from welfare to work, and lifted employment and earnings among such traditionally disadvantaged groups as high school dropouts.1 The percentage of people living below the federal poverty line declined from 13.1 percent to 12.4 percent between 1990 and 2000. Although the trend was positive it was a surprisingly small change in light of the nearly decadelongeconomicexpansion .2 Neverthelesstheaggregatenationaltrendobscured important variations in poverty changes across U.S. regions, metropolitan areas, cities, and suburbs. This chapter examines data from Census 2000 on poverty for the nation’s largest cities and their suburbs. It concludes that the outcomes were decidedly mixed in a decade widely regarded as one of the nation’s most prosperous . Overall central-city and suburban poverty converged slowly, and half of central cities saw their poverty rates decline. Some of the largest decreases 111 A Decade of Mixed Blessings Urban and Suburban Poverty in Census 2000 A L A N B E R U B E A N D W I L L I A M H . F R E Y 4 The authors are grateful to senior project programmer Cathy Sun and other support staff at the University of Michigan Population Studies Center, to Mark Muro for editorial assistance , and to other staff at the Brookings urban center for their advice and contributions. 1. Blank (2002). 2. See Peter T. Kilborn and Lynette Clemenson, “Gains of ’90s Did Not Lift All, Census Shows,” New York Times, June 5, 2002, p. A1, and Cindy Rodriguez and Bill Dedman, “Welfare Plunged in ’90s while Poverty Persisted,” Boston Globe, June 5, 2002, p. A1. occurred in cities that had very high poverty rates initially. The overall metropolitan poverty rate, however, was unchanged in the 1990s. By decade’s end there were 2.5 million more people living in poverty in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas than in 1990. The slight overall poverty decline in the 1990s camouflaged sharper increases and decreases in certain parts of the nation. The region of the country in which a particular city or suburb was located appeared to be the best predictor of its poverty rate trend in the 1990s; rates dropped markedly in cities throughout the Midwest and South, whereas cities and suburbs in southern California and the Northeast experienced increases. The chapter also presents evidence that population change was not a good predictor of poverty change in the last decade—many cities that lost considerable population in the 1990s saw declines in their poverty rates. METHODOLOGY First, we describe the geographic areas considered in this chapter and how the census determines poverty status for families and individuals. Metropolitan Area Definitions This chapter evaluates poverty trends during the 1990s for the country’s 102 largest metropolitan areas—those metropolitan areas with 500,000 or more inhabitants as reported in Census 2000. The metropolitan areas analyzed are those defined by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) and Primary Metropolitan Statistical Areas (PMSAs), and defined in the New England states as New England County Metropolitan Areas (NECMAs). Definition of Central City and Suburbs The present analysis defines central cities and their suburbs (the portion of the metropolitan area located outside of the central city) largely in accordance with OMB definitions in effect for Census 2000. These definitions are applied consistently to both 1990 and 2000 census data. OMB standards sometimes combine multiple cities to form the official “central city” for a given metropolitan area.3 These standards were modified slightly for pur112 Alan Berube and William H. Frey 3. The OMB designates the city with the largest population in each metropolitan area as a central city. Additional cities qualify for this designation if specified requirements are met concerning population size, commuting patterns, and employment/residence ratios. These standards, implemented after the 1990 Census, can be viewed at www.census.gov/population/ www/estimates/mastand.html. poses of this analysis, in that the largest or best-known city/cities in most large metropolitan areas have been...