>the immensely wasteful and
>unsustainable 'Amerikan dream' - a spruced-up
>over-marketed plywood shack in the burbs and a
>gas-guzzling monstrosity in the garage.
>
>Wojtek
The suburbs aren't what they used to be:
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/poverty_pendulum_swings_press.php?page=all
Poverty Pendulum Swings, Press Yawns
The recent news from the Brookings Institution that more Americans now live in poverty in suburbs than in cities has not been well covered by the press.
By Edward B. Colby Thu 21 Dec 2006 03:03 PM
More Americans now live in poverty in suburbs than in cities, a somewhat surprising shift that the Brookings Institution says “signals the latest stage in the long-run decentralization of people and jobs in the United States.”
In a report released two weeks ago, Brookings found that while the number of urban and suburban poor in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas was about even in 1999, by 2005 the suburbs, with 12.2 million residents, contained about 1.2 million more people in poverty than central cities did. In the AP story that broke the news, Alan Berube, the report’s co-author, said that the faster-growing populations of the suburbs, their increasing racial and economic diversification, and recent immigrants who “are increasingly bypassing cities and moving directly to suburbs, especially in the South and West” were reasons for the shift.
But though the report strikes us as precisely the kind of peg that reporters often require especially to write about poverty it has not been well covered by the press.
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