Poverty rate higher in suburbs than cities, including Seattle area

For poor suburbanites, having a car can be both a lifeline and a liability. In St. Louis County, which includes Ferguson, there are 90 municipalities. In a nine-mile strip, a driver can drive through as many as 16 of them, said Thomas Harvey, co-founder and executive director of the Arch City Defenders, a nonprofit agency that provides legal services for the indigent in St. Louis County. The Arch City Defenders released a study of the municipal courts in St. Louis County and found that in Ferguson, court fees were the suburb’s second-largest source of revenue.

Often, Harvey said, their clients will get traffic tickets driving through one of those 16 jurisdictions. Perhaps they’re driving a car that needs repairs before it can pass inspection. They can’t afford to pay the tickets and their licenses are suspended.

“These are people who are making a choice between paying their electricity and getting their car fixed,” Harvey said. He added that his group’s study also found that in Ferguson, 86 percent of traffic stops involved black motorists, although blacks make up just 67 percent of the population. Whites make up 29 percent of the population of Ferguson but account for just 12.7 percent of vehicle stops. Blacks in Ferguson were much more likely to be searched by police, although whites were more likely to be found with contraband, the study found.

Ferguson has a large apartment complex just across from where Michael Brown was shot. But most suburbs don’t have the kind of bleak projects that put inner cities like Chicago on the poverty map. Privation can look different in the suburbs, but poor is still poor.

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