[NYTr] Booming Economy: The New Suburban Poverty
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The Nation - Apr 23, 2007 issue
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070423&s=press
The New Suburban Poverty
by EYAL PRESS
Rockingham County, North Carolina, has never been known for its
opulence, but until recently most residents would not have hesitated to
describe it as comfortably middle class. For several decades the
county, a rectangular block of land in the north central part of the
state, owed its prosperity to textile mills and tobacco plants,
industries that weren't always friendly to unions but that nevertheless
furnished the local workforce with jobs that paid enough to raise a
family and buy a nice house somewhere.
Among those to do so was Johnny Price, a 44-year-old African-American
who lives in a ranch house with green shutters on a street called
Sparrow in a leafy residential subdivision on the outskirts of the town
of Eden. Two towering oak trees dominate Price's front lawn. In his
driveway sits a navy blue station wagon. By the standards of some newly
built suburbs, the setup is modest, but for Price, the youngest of ten
children whose father died when he was 6 and whose mother worked as a
domestic servant, it's a testament to the rewards of hard work and
perseverance, values he's tried to instill in his teenage son and
daughter, who have lived with him since he and his wife divorced.
Lately this has gotten more challenging. A year ago Price lost the job
he'd held for nineteen years in company-wide layoffs at Unified, a
textile manufacturer. He's now struggling to make do on $1,168 in
monthly unemployment benefits and, like many people in Rockingham
County, which has been ravaged by plant closings in recent years,
wondering how long he'll be able to continue paying his mortgage.
Stories of downward mobility in America's suburbs have not exactly
cluttered the headlines over the past decade. Gated communities of
dream homes, mansions ringed by man-made lakes and glass-cube office
parks: These are the images typically evoked by the posh, supersized
subdivisions built during the 1990s technology boom. Low-wage jobs,
houses under foreclosure, families unable to afford food and medical
care are not. But venture beyond the city limits of any major
metropolitan area today, and you will encounter these things, in forms
less concentrated--and therefore less visible--than in the more
blighted pockets of our cities perhaps, but with growing frequency all
the same. In the three counties surrounding Greensboro, North Carolina,
the city half an hour south of where Johnny Price lives, the poverty
rate has surged in recent years. It now stands at 14.4 percent, only
slightly below the level in New Orleans.
Greensboro, it turns out, is not alone. Last December the Brookings
Institution published a report showing that from Las Vegas to Boise to
Houston, suburban poverty has been growing over the past seven years,
in some places slowly, in others by as much as 33 percent. "The
enduring social and fiscal challenges for cities that stem from high
poverty are increasingly shared by their suburbs," the report
concludes. It's a problem some may assume is confined to the ragged
fringes of so-called "inner ring" suburbs that directly border cities,
places where the housing stock is older and from which many wealthier
residents long ago departed. But this isn't the case. "Overall...first
suburbs did not bear the brunt of increasing suburban poverty in the
early 2000s," notes the Brookings report, which found that economic
distress has spread to "second-tier suburbs and 'exurbs'" as well.
The result is a historic milestone that has gone strangely ignored: For
the first time ever, more poor Americans live in the suburbs than in
all our cities combined.
One reason this shift may not have sunk into public consciousness is
that for as long as suburbs have existed, Americans have tended to
envision them as pristine sanctuaries where people go to escape
brushing shoulders with the poor. The most familiar historical
example--much lamented by a generation of progressives who came to
associate the migration to suburbs with racial backlash and urban
decline--is the mass exodus of middle-class white ethnics from the
nation's central cities, which accelerated in the wake of the riots and
social unrest of the 1960s. In more recent years, it's often assumed,
the forces fueling the growth of suburbs have only made things
worse--the social landscape more segregated, the sprawl more extreme,
the gap increasingly vast between people who rarely set foot in cities
and those who rarely leave them.
In fact, however, the gentrification of many urban neighborhoods, from
Brooklyn to San Francisco to Washington, has forced many working-class
residents out. In a reversal of the classic migration story, many of
these displaced residents have fled to the suburbs, lured in part by
the growing pool of mostly low-wage jobs there--cleaning homes, mowing
lawns, staffing restaurants, strip malls and office plazas. Alan
Berube, co-author of the Brookings Institution study, says the
"decentralization of low-wage employment" is one of the main factors
driving suburban poverty rates up.
In some counties, a lot of those jobs are falling to immigrants, who
are increasingly heading straight to the suburbs rather than to cities
in search of employment. In his 2004 book On Paradise Drive, David
Brooks presents a sunny portrait of the gorgeous mosaic that the influx
of foreigners into formerly lily-white subdivisions has wrought. "Now
you'll see little Taiwanese girls in the figure-skating clinics,
Ukrainian boys learning to pitch," he writes.
What you'll also see are people like the day laborers who gather every
morning in the parking lots of the Home Depots in Nassau County, Long
Island, where the median family income is $87,558 and the overall
poverty rate is fairly low, but where the demand for food stamps has
increased by 40 percent since 2003. Although the median hourly wage for
the roofing and construction jobs that day laborers land is $10 an
hour, many don't see a penny of this: A study last year by researchers
at UCLA found that nearly half experience wage theft. A worker from
Mexico I spoke with on a frigid day in February said he was owed $400
for some plumbing he'd done recently. Like most of the other men around
him, he wore a hooded sweatshirt rather than a coat and cupped his
fingers around his mouth to warm his bare hands, proper winter apparel
evidently being an unaffordable luxury. Because the work is seasonal
and sporadic, few day laborers earn more than $15,000 a year. More than
half of those injured on the job don't receive the medical care they
need.
Other immigrants on Long Island ply trades whose wages and hours call
to mind certain features of urban sweatshops, save that the
exploitation, like so much else in suburbia, is more hidden and
dispersed. "We did a survey of domestic workers here and found that
people were working seventy-hour weeks and getting, on average, $4.03
an hour," said Nadia Marin-Molina, director of an immigrants' rights
organization called the Workplace Project, in Nassau County. Not long
ago, three workers dropped by her office from a nearby restaurant to
report they'd been getting $20 for twelve-hour shifts, well below the
minimum wage even after factoring in tips. At a deli in the town center
of Garden City, an affluent enclave of sprawling homes and fancy shops
just down the road from the Workplace Project's modest headquarters,
several others were fired simply for demanding to be paid on the books.
Last year, the Workplace Project helped immigrants in Nassau County
recuperate $143,849 in back wages, some from contractors who paid them
with checks that bounced, others from companies like Popeyes and
D'Angelo Pizzeria that didn't compensate them for overtime.
That landing a service job hardly guarantees earning an adequate income
would not come as news to former factory workers in North Carolina.
Johnny Price is currently enrolled in courses at Rockingham Community
College, funded under the Trade Adjustment Act, in the hope of becoming
an accountant. He told me there's no way he could keep up with his $700
mortgage payments and support his kids working as a clerk in a place
like Wal-Mart, a major employer with two new stores in the area.
Price used to make $15 an hour, with health benefits and vacation days.
What he's hoping to avoid is the fate of people like Jodi Wilmouth,
whom I met at the Rockingham County Red Cross, which opened a food
pantry several years ago in a low-slung brick building in Eden.
Wilmouth earns $6.25 an hour as a cashier at a local department store
called Belk, which she said is not enough to cover her basic expenses.
On the day she dropped by, President Bush was visiting a Caterpillar
plant in Peoria, Illinois. He later said that in today's economy
"workers are making more money."
Ada Wells, who works at the food pantry, offered a different view.
"What we have are the working poor," said Wells, another former textile
employee. "When I left my factory in 1999, the lowest-paid workers made
$9 an hour, with insurance and vacation days. Now we have people who
can't pay their electricity bills on the wages they earn."
There are certain comparative advantages to being poor in a place other
than inner-city Cleveland or Detroit. Whatever else he may fear, Price
doesn't have to worry about his children growing up on a street strewn
with crack vials and gang graffiti--the one he lives on has manicured
lawns and driveways with basketball hoops. The peculiar toxicity of
urban poverty, many scholars believe, rests in its intense
concentration, the welter of enmeshed problems that fuel crime,
spiraling dropout rates and an air of hopelessness that leeches into
every aspect of neighborhood life.
But the suburbs also have their disadvantages, among them the fact that
getting anywhere generally requires a car. There's no public
transportation system in most outlying suburban areas, which is why the
people who show up at the food pantry at the Red Cross in Rockingham
County often carpool to get there, cramming one person each from four
or five families into a single vehicle to save gas. Then, too, the
newness of suburban poverty means in many towns there's a dearth of
social service agencies to offer help. Nearly 7,000 people showed up at
the food pantry last year, a sevenfold increase from 2000. "It's
overwhelming," said Janna Nowell, the facility's director. The day
before I visited, the pantry ran out of food, a problem that's become
familiar in many suburban locales. "There's a growing spatial gap
between the providers and the people in need," says Alan Berube.
"Public hospitals, nutrition assistance programs--most of these things
are still overwhelmingly urban. You see small-scale operations in
suburbs getting inundated. They just can't deal with the demand."
An even more vexing challenge is finding an affordable place to live,
since most of the low-income, subsidized housing in America was built
in cities. Where do indigent people in the suburbs go? In North
Carolina, among the few options are places like the slate-gray trailer
that 62-year-old Barbara Hall now calls home. She used to live in a
four-bedroom ranch house with her husband and kids. That was before she
got divorced and lost her job. "It's humiliating," says Hall, who has
long silver hair, clear blue eyes and a chronic bad back that requires
her to take medication she can't currently afford.
There are, of course, more fortunate people in the suburbs whose houses
have doubled and tripled in size in recent years--tech workers in the
booming area surrounding North Carolina's research triangle, for
example. But since 1998, housing foreclosures in North Carolina have
nearly tripled.
The trend extends beyond the South--there were 1.2 million foreclosures
across the country in 2006, a 42 percent increase from the previous
year--and is among the indications that the number of people under
economic duress in many suburbs far exceeds the percentage that is
officially poor.
Compared with Barbara Hall, who is unemployed and surviving on
disability checks, Rosa Melara, who lives in Montgomery County,
Maryland, a suburban area adjacent to Washington, is doing well. Melara
works in a nail salon and earned $28,000 last year. She also lives in a
county with more low-income housing than most suburbs, thanks to
inclusionary zoning policies that for decades have required affordable
units to be built in large-scale developments. Yet Melara rents a
converted garage without heating because most of the apartments and
houses in Montgomery County are still well beyond her means. About half
the parishioners in the church she attends in suburban Bethesda are
facing similar problems, she told me.
I met Melara at another church in neighboring Howard County, also in
the Washington-Baltimore corridor and for several years among the
wealthiest counties in the United States. Last year a task force on
affordable housing appointed by County Executive James Robey warned
that "an undeniable gap" exists between the need for low-income housing
and its availability in the area, and not only for the poor. Seventy
percent of the jobs in the county, including those of entry-level
teachers in its celebrated public school system, cops who patrol the
streets and firemen who respond to emergencies, pay less than $50,000 a
year. Meanwhile, the average single-family house sold for nearly ten
times that amount, $485,500, and rents have crept ever higher. The
result is that a growing share of the population--public servants,
couples starting families, retirees, recent college graduates--can't
find affordable places to live, according to the task force: "These are
the children and parents of County residents," its report stated,
"County teachers and police officers, the waiters and waitresses who
serve meals, the Mall workers, the hospital workers, the people who
contribute to the quality of life in Howard County in countless ways."
The dilemma is far worse, of course, for the truly indigent, not least
because a lot of suburbanites who might be willing to hire them as
nannies or to be served by them at restaurants don't necessarily want
them as neighbors. In June 2005 authorities in the town of Brookhaven,
in Suffolk County, Long Island, launched a series of raids to shut down
overcrowded homes in which immigrants lacking other affordable options
were renting rooms. County Executive Steve Levy, a Democrat, declared
that the evictions were necessary to "preserve suburbia as we know it."
At 196 Berkshire Drive, a powder-blue clapboard house that was raided,
immigrants protested by setting up tents in the backyard and sleeping
outside. Others who were evicted wound up sleeping in the woods on
plastic sheets, their belongings stowed under bushes. In a special
report on housing on Long Island, Newsday likened the packed, often
filthy quarters where many immigrants live--a dozen boarders crammed
into a basement flooded with sewage, adults sleeping in the closets of
houses on tree-lined streets in nice neighborhoods--to
"turn-of-the-century tenements."
Other counties have introduced anti-soliciting laws to drive away day
laborers like the ones I met outside the Home Depot in neighboring
Nassau County, another sign that being poor in the suburbs comes with
the added burden of being made to feel you don't belong. Several of the
workers I met told me they've been called "parasites." Some day
laborers have had rocks thrown at them. At one point, the Mexican man I
spoke with motioned toward a red car that circled by, driven, he said,
by a security guard from Staples who patrols the area to make sure he
and his fellow laborers stay on the edge of the parking lot, so
customers won't be disturbed. In September 2000 two immigrants were
picked up by what they thought were contractors, taken to an abandoned
warehouse and nearly killed. (They survived by dashing onto the Long
Island Expressway.)
Such incidents may be viewed as a product of racism or of something
else: a sense of anxiety about the future that extends far beyond the
ranks of the poor. "I do think middle-class people here feel squeezed,
and if leaders don't offer solutions, they'll look for people to
blame," says Workplace Project's Marin-Molina. As in Howard County,
evidence of this insecurity is not hard to come by. In 2004 more than
40 percent of Long Island homeowners spent more than one-third of their
income (the conventional definition of a "cost burden") on housing, a
report published last year by Adelphi University found. In recent years
the typical starting job in the region has paid $24,000, far short of
the $60,780 the Economic Policy Institute has estimated a family of
four would need to cover basic living expenses.
Unravel the thread linking suburbs to prosperity and something else
begins to come undone: the story Republicans have told about how people
living there, particularly those in the fastest-growing,
furthest-outlying communities, are their natural constituents.
"Democrats stink in the exurbs" is how conservative columnist Brooks
put it some years ago, pointing to the strip-mall zones around Orlando,
strong Jeb Bush territory, and to Mesa, Arizona, a booming area east of
Phoenix. In these rapidly expanding communities, places where the
parking lots of megachurches fill up every Sunday with SUVs, liberals
just don't have a clue what matters to people, Brooks implied. In the
2004 election, it appeared he was right: Republicans swept such areas,
carrying a startling ninety-seven of the 100 fastest-growing counties
in the country. In Democratic circles, panic ensued.
It turned out the panic was premature. In last year's midterm elections
the GOP's advantage in the exurbs narrowed considerably. Democrats won
60 percent of the vote in inner suburbs, 55 percent in the next ring
and a majority of the overall suburban vote. They would not control
either the House or Senate today were it not for these gains.
In part, the shift reflects widespread disillusionment with the war in
Iraq. But it may also be a sign that Republicans have become the
clueless ones when it comes to decoding the concerns of suburbanites.
The GOP's presumed edge with these voters rested on the assumption that
new suburban growth centers were filling up with prosperous
middle-class professionals who care most about low taxes and being left
alone to raise their kids. A lot of suburbs now appear to be filling up
with a different social type: stressed-out parents worried about
healthcare, college tuition and paying their mortgage. Political
scientist Jacob Hacker has referred to such people as "office-park
populists," folks who "aren't necessarily buying smash-the-system rants
against free trade and immigration...[but] are skeptical of corporate
promises and concerned about their security."
Addressing the concerns of such people is, of course, not necessarily
synonymous with tackling the predicament of the suburban poor. (As the
raids on immigrants in Nassau County show, suburban populism can cut
two ways.) Nor is the party affiliation of low-income suburbanites
necessarily so easy to predict. In North Carolina I met numerous people
who fumed about the scandalously low minimum wage or about NAFTA--and
then told me they were Republicans. Others complained about the
exorbitant cost of healthcare--and about how the government is giving
it away free to undocumented Mexicans. But still others nodded when
asked about John Edwards's assertion that there are two Americas today.
"We do have two Americas," said Ada Wells of Rockingham County, "and
they don't understand each other." Many suburbanites I spoke with
seemed interested in issues--affordable housing, a higher minimum wage,
universal health insurance--that progressive Democrats have long argued
should be at the center of the party's agenda, and that both Hacker's
"office-park populists" and the people who clean those offices for a
living have a stake in. Granted, the affluent software engineers
flocking to emerging suburbs might still care more about lower taxes.
But more than half the people in emerging suburbs don't have a
four-year college degree. The African-American population in such
places surged by 50 percent in the 1990s. "If you look at emerging
suburbs, they're becoming rapidly more diverse," says the Democratic
pollster Ruy Teixeira. "And they're full of people who don't make a lot
of money."
Beyond altering voting patterns, the dispersal of poverty to the
suburbs has the potential to upend a larger idea: that the interests of
suburbanites and city dwellers are diametrically opposed. This has been
the guiding--if often unspoken--premise driving regional development
for decades, one that has played no small part in fueling residential
segregation and sprawl. But if cities and suburbs increasingly face
many of the same problems, wouldn't it make sense for them to work
together?
One proponent of this view is David Rusk, former mayor of Albuquerque
and a longtime advocate of more equitable regional development. "In
order to deal with the problems of poverty and economic decline
reaching across cities into many suburbs, you have to get states to lay
down some strong directives with regard to balanced regional housing
development and some form of regional tax-base sharing," he says. To
illustrate why, Rusk cites the case of southern New Jersey, in
particular the area surrounding Camden. "This is an area of roughly
1.75 million people, and the ten fastest-growing municipalities, in
terms of job creation, are all third-ring suburbs," he says. "They saw
the creation of about 42,000 jobs in the 1990s, but the construction of
only 1,200 low-income housing units. Meanwhile, the ten areas that were
the biggest employment losers saw 25,000 jobs disappear, but 16,000
price-controlled housing units built. It's a mirror opposite of what's
needed--where the job supply is growing, there's no affordable
workforce housing. Where it's vanishing, it's all piled in."
Rusk has coined a motto that a growing number of advocacy groups and
regional leaders are coming to embrace: "If you're good enough to work
here, you're good enough to live here." It is with this principle in
mind that New Jersey reformers are rallying behind the idea of
repealing an unsavory practice known as a Regional Contribution
Agreement, or RCA, an innocuous-sounding term for the Machiavellian
deals that enable one municipality--typically an affluent, high-growth
suburb--to circumvent its obligation to build low-income housing within
its boundaries by paying another municipality--typically a poor city
desperate for money--to construct the units instead. The not-so-subtle
purpose is to enable suburbs to prevent the "wrong" kind of people from
moving in. New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine has said he thinks RCAs are
detrimental, but he has yet to endorse legislation introduced in the
State Senate that would abolish them.
Even if Corzine comes around, it's perhaps naove to imagine that such
practices will altogether cease: The suburbs were created, after all,
precisely to erect spatial barriers between rich and poor. This is
surely part of the reason new ones keep springing up in ever more
remote areas, away from the crime and squalor (read: poor brown and
black folk) in urban locales. But it is also a fact that less affluent
people are slowly but surely finding their way into suburbs anyway.
Jonathan Lange, an organizer with the Industrial Areas Foundation,
works in two of the wealthiest areas in the country: Maryland's Howard
and Montgomery counties. The poverty in both places is "discreet, hard
to get your hands on and extremely difficult to organize," he says.
Nevertheless, it's there. Not long ago, a pastor Lange knows discovered
that there are scores of homeless kids at Oakland Mills, a Howard
County high school. Some of the kids sleep in cars, others in cheap
motels, the pastor was told, an experience unimaginable to many of
their classmates, perhaps, but increasingly emblematic of the suburban
population these days.
*
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