Poverty Aid Misfocused

This post from The Brookings Institution argues that poverty programs should pay more attention to suburban poverty.

"Just as immigrants on the whole have followed natives to the suburbs, so have the foreign-born poor followed the native-born poor to these areas. As a result, suburban areas with little or no experience with either immigration or poverty now face complex and unfamiliar public policy challenges.

Traditional anti-poverty programs have focused on central cities, and the suburban infrastructure including local governments, non profits, and private funders have not caught up with the shifting geography of poverty and immigration. In places with little prior history of immigration, service agencies sometimes struggle to help to new influxes of immigrants in diverse languages, and demand for English language classes is often much higher than supply. "