Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States

6. Declining Inner-Ring Suburbs

6 Declining Inner-Ring Suburbs T rayce Davis lives in a suburb within Cook County, Illinois. She also lives in poverty. “We live in the suburbs, [but] it means nothing. It’s just a word,” Davis says. “We are here struggling just like everybody else, and wow, man, it devastated me for a minute. I was like, I live in the suburbs. I moved away from the city to get some help, but the struggle goes on.” In a recent article in the Daily Herald newspaper, Davis describes how, despite her job, she and her family struggle to barely make the rent each month (Krone 2008). Davis’s story was prompted by a new report on poverty in Illinois that found that, in 2006, approximately 367,000 residents of suburban Cook, Lake, DuPage, Kane, and McHenry counties were living in poverty. The suburbs have always had a certain number of poor residents, but in recent decades these numbers have increased. In 2006, the suburbs of Chicago accounted for 42 percent of the region’s poor, up from only 24 percent in 1980 (Krone 2008). Problems of increasing poverty and declining income are now documented as part of suburban living. This chapter examines changes in poverty and income among the suburbs of the top one hundred most-populated metropolitan areas, in part to discern the nature of these changes among inner-ring as well as outer suburbs. 70 / Chapter 6 New Suburban Poverty There were 6.1 million suburban residents living in poverty in 2000, an increase from 3.7 million in 1980. Of those suburbanites living in poverty in 2000, 2.8 million were living in inner-ring suburbs, and 2.9 million were in the outer suburbs.1 Between 1980 and 2000, the number of innerring suburban residents living in poverty increased by more than 800,000. The outer suburbs added about 1.6 million poor residents during the same period. Suburbs, long associated with the outward movement of the middle class, have become the location for poor people as well. As the suburbs grew—particularly the outer suburbs—so did the number of poor suburbanites. Poor suburban residents increased not just in raw numbers but also as a proportion of the total suburban population. As Table 6.1 indicates, the poverty rate among suburbs rose from 7.2 percent to 8.1 percent from 1980 to 2000. On aggregate, the poverty rate among inner-ring suburbs remained practically unchanged from 1980 to 2000, although poverty rates were higher among these suburbs than among the outer suburbs both years. Beyond the national aggregate, poverty rose in the inner-ring suburbs of different census regions. In the Midwest and the Northeast, poverty among inner-ring suburbs increased, while poverty among outer suburbs declined or remained unchanged between 1980 and 2000. The poverty gap between inner-ring and outer suburbs increased over time in the Northeast and the Midwest. The South and the West had relatively high rates of suburban poverty in both decades, even among their outer suburbs. However, poverty in these regions was still higher in inner-ring rather than in outer suburbs in 1The remaining half million resided in older outer suburbs. TABLE 6.1 PERCENTAGE OF SUBURBAN RESIDENTS LIVING IN POVERTY BY CENSUS REGION, 1980 AND 2000 All suburbs Inner-ring suburbs Outer suburbs Region 1980 2000 1980 2000 1980 2000 United States 7.2 8.1 9.1 9.0 6.8 7.3 Northeast 6.8 6.9 6.7 7.0 5.8 5.1 Midwest 5.3 5.8 5.6 7.4 4.2 4.0 South 8.4 9.1 8.0 11.2 8.0 8.3 West 8.8 10.0 10.1 13.0 7.6 8.5 Declining Inner-Ring Suburbs / 71 2000. About one in every nine residents of the South’s inner-ring suburbs lived in poverty that year. In the West, the rate was more than one in every eight residents. As with the Northeast and the Midwest, the difference in poverty between inner-ring and outer suburbs grew. In each census region, poverty was more pronounced among inner-ring than outer suburbs in 2000, and the poverty-rate increase was greater among inner-ring than outer suburbs between 1980 and 2000. Table 6.2 shows the number of suburbs that experienced poverty increases in the different census regions. Six in every...