The "Suburbanization of Poverty" is a Decades-Long Trend

The current observation is that the urban poor are moving to the suburbs. Alon Levy says that this is nothing new, and the current effects of such movement is in fact just the "tipping point" of what's been happening for the last 50 years.

October 2, 2011, 5am PDT | Judy Chang

"Poverty is suburbanizing from the inside out rather than from the outside in, just as wealth and the upwardly mobile middle class did fifty years ago.

Although this implies that suburbia is unsustainable, the way it implies it is different from the usual explanation. It's not that the future is bad for low-density settlements and good for high-density ones. It's that the American urban form and political geography, especially but not only in the suburbs, are fundamentally unsustainable, and require constant growth to persist."

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Suburbanization of Poverty: What’s New?

Published on Tuesday, September 27, 2011 in Pedestrian Observations