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Soaring Housing Costs Are Culprit In Suburban Poverty Copyright April 28, 1999, USA TODAY Reprinted with permission. |
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By Haya El Nasser USA TODAY EVANSTON, ILL. -- This lakeshore suburb of Chicago is well known for its stately brick and stone homes, lakefront mansions and the lovely Northwestern University campus. But behind this façade of affluence, a bleaker side of suburbia is emerging. More than a third of Evanston's elementary and middle school students qualify for free or reduced lunches -- an all-time high. At the Second Baptist Church downtown, lines for free lunches are so long that the soup kitchen has moved from the 48-seat dining room to the 150-seat fellowship hall. The number of people who go to Evanston food pantries is up 27% from a year ago. Despite a glowing economy and record low unemployment, poverty is rising in the suburbs. Affluence still dominates the suburban landscape and public housing is rare. But in growing numbers, poor people are living unnoticed next to middle-class families, and the suburbs are beginning to face the same problem cities have struggled with since the flight to the suburbs began in the 1950s. A study by the Center on Hunger and Poverty at Tufts University estimates that by 2010, the percentage of children in poverty will have grown at a faster rate in the suburbs than in inner-city and rural areas, the traditional strongholds of poverty. Both affluent and older working-class suburbs are seeing a rise in the number of people living at or barely above the federal poverty line of $16,450 for a family of four; $8050 for one person. The Census Bureau reported a slight dip in the poverty rate in 1997 in rural areas, central cities and suburbs. But the suburban poverty rate is still higher than in 1990, 9% vs. 8.2%. And urban experts expect the 2000 Census to reveal a big jump in poverty in suburban communities. There are a number of reasons for this growing problem, experts say. Welfare reform has cut government benefits for millions. Cutbacks in housing subsidies are depleting the supply of affordable housing. And skyrocketing housing prices mean rents and mortgages are eating up so much of a person's paycheck that it's a struggle to pay for food, clothing and child care. Many who work for minimum wage are relying on food pantries, free school lunches and soup kitchens to feed their families. Older suburbs closest to the big cities -- the so-called "inner-ring suburbs" -- are feeling the effects of the spread of poverty most. Middle-class homeowners, searching for newer homes and more space farther out, have abandoned older suburbs. The older and cheaper housing there has attracted a poorer population that is eager to escape crime and crumbling schools in the inner city and get closer to jobs in fast-growing suburbs. Anti-poverty activists say that the push to gentrify and revitalize central cities also has contributed to suburban poverty, as the poor are pushed out from the inner city. In a sense, just as jobs and population have sprawled out from the city, so has poverty. "People still think that problems of central cities magically stop at the border," says Myron Orfield, a Minnesota state representative and head of the non-profit Metropolitan Area Research Corporation. "It's going to catch up with all middle income communities." Even in thriving older suburbs like Evanston, soaring housing prices are pushing more working people and elderly to the brink of poverty. The median household income in Evanston is $62,253, according to Claritas, a marketing research firm. Half make more and half make less. The median price of single-family homes is almost $300,000. High housing costs here have increased the pressure to provide more services for the poor. In February, U.S. Rep. Janice Schakowsky, a Democrat whose district includes Evanston, held a forum on hunger to raise residents' awareness. "Poverty is all pretty hidden right now because the focus is on the booming economy," she says. "But all social services programs are stretched. The elderly are hurting, personal bankruptcies are at an all-time high, single moms are struggling." In part because of a reluctance to recognize that poverty exists in their backyards, many suburbs don't seek funds for social programs or affordable housing. As a result, the bulk of state and federal money to help the poor is going to cities. "Suburbs have been reluctant to be in the social services business," says Michael Rock, city manager of Lakewood, a Denver suburb where the need for low-income housing is rising. "We tend to want to export the problem." Non-profit groups, churches and synagogues are struggling to fill the void. But they face opposition from taxpayers to do not want homeless shelters and lower-income housing nearby. Federal and state governments are just beginning to realize that poverty is spreading beyond big-city limits. In Cleveland, older suburbs that are grappling with poverty have formed a consortium to gain a voice in state and federal decisions that pull more jobs and funding out of their cities. But that kind of cooperation is rare. "There is very little thinking about this," Orfield says. "If you don't live in one of these places, you don't know about it at all. And if you're a politician, you think these places are few and far between." Urban experts say federal and state governments need to tackle the root cause of the problem: sprawl. For decades, federal policies, such as transportation spending, have encouraged jobs and housing to move farther out. "The poor are more and more isolated from jobs," says Bruce Katz, director of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution. "There needs to be more fiscal equity between jurisdictions." Evidence of poverty in the suburbs ranges from higher participation in free school-lunch programs to rising demand for free food: Requests for food and clothing at Arlington charities in Arlington, Texas, a suburb of Dallas and Fort Worth, jumped 32% from 1995 to 1988 when 41,057 people asked for help. Food distributed by the Greater Boston Food Bank in suburbs like Needham, Westwood, Dedham and Norwood jumped 50% the past three years. The food bank estimates that a third of the people who come and are working full-time, but for minimum wage. Johnson County, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City, Mo., has the highest median household income the Kansas: more than $55,000 a year. But the Harvesters community food bank reports an 8% jump this year in the number of people needing help. It expects a 16% jump by next year as more people go off welfare. One in 10 students in the county qualifies for free or reduced school lunches, up from one in 12 in 1990. The homeless population jumped 29% from 1997 to 1998. Virginia's Fairfax County, a suburb of Washington, D.C., has the highest median household income the nation: more than $88,000 a year. But the number of school-age children living in poverty in that county rose 81% in the first half of this decade -- in part because of a large influx of immigrants. A 1998 survey of more than 6,000 people in Denver-area shelters showed that 43% said their last permanent residence was in the suburbs vs. 38% in the city. More astounding was that 13% said they had spent the previous night in Boulder County, one of the most affluent in the region. These figures are no revelation to anti-poverty activists like Pat Vance, head of Neighbors at Work in Evanston. But they are to many. "Nobody in suburbia wants to be identified as poor and many of the poor make an extra effort to blend in," she says. Beyond a well-known pocket of poverty along Howard Street, which is dividing line between Chicago and Evanston, the poor are almost invisible here. Yet on Grant Street, two houses up from a $500,000 home, is the Evanston Day Nursery. Sixty percent of the children who attend get full or partial government subsidies because their parents are poor or nearly poor. On the next block, squeezed between $200,000-plus homes, is one of Evanston's few public housing buildings-a one-story duplex that looks more like a modest garden apartment than the projects. Rents in suburbs like Evanston are so high that someone like Roy Fisher, 49, who expects to earn about $12,000 this year as a part-time janitor and computer repairman, is having a hard time making ends meet. "I make enough money so that I'm not eligible for most of the social services," he says. He pays $400 a month to rent a room in the basement of a house near downtown. He has no health insurance because he works part-time. Because he has high blood pressure, he can't eat free meals in soup kitchens; they're too high in cholesterol. He is now searching for a place to live where the rent is cheaper -- a hard thing to find in Evanston. Derril Edwards rents a two-bedroom apartment on Hull Terrace, a quiet street dominated by small apartment buildings. His neighbors are college professors, medical students and senior citizens. But Edwards is poor. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1993. At the time, he lived in an apartment in Wilmette, another affluent Chicago suburb, and earned $40,000 a year restoring antique wicker. He became so sick that he could not work for two months. He faced eviction. "I lived OK before, but I had never been in a situation where there was money in the bank," says Edwards, 52. He hasn't been able to work since and quietly slipped into poverty. But with the help of Vance's organization, Edwards received a federal housing voucher that pays about 70% of his rent. He receives $571 a month from Social Security, food stamps and he goes to local food pantries twice a week. The local animal hospital provides free care for his dog, a Lhasa aspo named Dorothy. "But people wouldn't know I was poor unless I told them," Edwards says. Copyright 1999, USA TODAY Reprinted with permission. << Back to Press Clippings |
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