Caution: This post contains graphic images of housing displacement. Viewer discretion is advised.
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It’s apparently acceptable for suburbs to actively discourage – and in this case, actually relocate – low-income renters. By pretending this sort of thing only happens in Brooklyn or San Francisco, we leave the low-income households who used to live in these now-demolished Marietta apartments vulnerable to very real displacement.
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This suburb is a growing place, but it's not a successful place. It risks becoming an increasingly isolating place full of people who are cut off from the economic mainstream.
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The reconfiguration of a bus route to reach lower-income suburban areas is a symptom of the problem, not the real treatment.
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This interactive map lets you explore concentrations of suburban poverty and their growth over the last four decades.
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The deck is stacked against suburban residents trying to make it out of poverty and the current network of nonprofit and government-based service agencies is not set up to help them.
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Our de facto national housing policy of drive-till-you-qualify suburban development works well enough for people with an education and a professional salary. It fails the working class entirely and that’s by design.
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The state of Florida went all-in on the suburban experiment in a way that few other places did. Overbuilt and half empty, many Florida suburbs will never climb out of debt and decline.
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What will happen to Homeowner's Associations in an America with increasing suburban poverty? It will be messy.
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The spectre of poverty haunts hundreds of American suburbs and effects millions of Americans. Let's take a look at the data behind suburban poverty: its causes, impacts and current trends.
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Next time you want to label a town as 'family oriented' - don't just think about the young and middle-aged people that are able to depend on an automobile at a moment's notice. Ask yourself, would your 13 year old kid or elderly grandma with a walker have their freedom and be happy there?
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Ponder what life will be like following another decade or two of inversion, with society’s arrangements -- no longer able to be propped up by an expanding state. Consider an America where the affluent inhabit our core cities and the poor are left behind on our suburbanized outskirts.
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Toms River, NJ was built as a collection of convenient commodities and it will be discarded once it exceeds its usefulness.
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Ferguson is trapped in a cycle of decline, not because of its people or even their poverty, but because it is designed to be that way. Failing suburbs are where the power shifts of our time are concentrating desperation and discontent. Sadly, Ferguson will not be an anomaly.
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Most American cities experience a modest, short term illusion of wealth in exchange for enormous, long term liabilities.
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The low density auto-dependent development pattern will persist for a few more decades. So will hyper dense concentrated city centers. And then both will decline as they become overwhelmed by multiple physical, economic, and political constraints.
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While the most common image of poverty is a high-rise public housing project, in fact many of America’s poor live in the very type of neighborhood where investment is impeded by current financing regulations.
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Life in the exurban fallout zones of the housing crisis is precarious. Overbuilt and half empty, many suburbs will never climb out of debt and decline. Federal housing policies put them in this place.
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