While high poverty in some urban areas comes as no surprise, the growing poverty rates in a few suburban areas have been more unexpected. In an attempt to better understand this trend, 24/7 Wall St. analyzed the 10 metropolitan areas with the highest rates of poverty in their suburbs, as ranked by the Brookings Institute.
The trend toward suburban poverty has been under way for nearly a decade. And in some metropolitan areas, the poverty rates in the suburbs are higher than in the cities they surround.
“Between 2000 and 2008, suburbs in the country’s largest metro areas had their poor populations grow by 25% — almost five times faster than the cities themselves…”, the Brookings Institute recently reported.
