Nationally, there’s no single path to poverty in the suburbs. Some of suburbia’s poor are the formerly middle class who were walloped by the 2007-09 recession, losing jobs and homes when the housing bubble popped. Some are immigrants who bypassed the traditional urban route and headed straight for the suburbs. Others are lower-income African Americans and Latinos who were pushed out of gentrifying cities as housing prices skyrocketed. Other people, some of them with federal housing vouchers, left cities looking for jobs, safer neighborhoods or better schools.
“The movement to the suburbs is really about people moving to opportunity,” said john a. powell (he spells his name with lowercase letters), a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Hass Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society.
“But low-income people have not landed in places of high opportunity in the suburbs,” Powell said. “They move from depressed cities to depressed suburbs. They are trying to move to opportunity, and they are failing. Opportunity is moving away from them.”