Suburban poverty growing in America, overtaking cities

Most Americans tend to think poverty is concentrated in urban areas, but a look at the numbers offers a rebuttal to that conventional notion.

“It’s been a shift over to the suburbs for quite some time,” said Elizabeth Kneebone, University of Pennsylvania Institute for Urban Research scholar and a fellow of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. “But the 2000s were remarkable for the rapid uptick in poverty there. And it’s actually the decade in which, for the first time, we crossed a tipping point, where now there are more poor residents living in the suburbs than the big cities that anchor those regions.”

Kneebone spoke with WHYY’s Dave Heller about the recent book she co-authored, “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America.”