"Urban" Woes Hit the Suburbs and Rural America
Quick, lock those gates!
As we've "revitalized" cities to attract the middle-class, our gentrification efforts have pushed working-class and low-income families beyond the city limits, to aging housing stock in older inner-ring suburbs and distant exurbs far from job centers. Over time, the suburbs have become home to a higher number of people living in poverty, even though cities remain home to a higher concentration of poor residents overall. So it should come as no surprise now:
Rural and suburban homeless make up about 1/3 of the overall homeless population, compared to less than 25% in 2007. West Coast states have the highest proportion of homeless residents, due to the foreclosure crisis.
Tellingly, a report from UNH found that children living in rural, cohabiting households almost doubled since 2000, whereas in cities the growth has been about 1% (the percentage of kids in cohabiting houses overall is quite small). Study authors think this is an "economic survival strategy" by single, rural mothers:
"We think that growing economic stress in rural America is in part driving this rapid increase of cohabiting in rural households," says report author William O'Hare, a Carsey Institute policy fellow and senior fellow at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. "The jump in the share of rural children living in cohabiting households has occurred since 2000, when economic conditions in rural America began to deteriorate."
O'Hare and his co-authors Wendy Manning, Meredith Porter and Heidi Lyons state that for single rural women with children, joining a household with a man may be an economic survival strategy. While cohabiting families have poverty rates double those of married-couple households, they are less than half those for single-mother households.
The first step in warding off homelessness, perhaps?
(Photo of an abandoned farm by James Jordan)
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