In the 1960s and ’70s, “white flight” in cities like Detroit helped concentrate poverty inside the city limits as more affluent residents fled to the suburbs. Today, well-educated job-seekers seeking shorter commutes, walkable communities, and other urban amenities are gentrifying once-sketchy neighborhoods, and the poor are getting pushed out — to the suburbs.
“From Miami to Denver, resurgent downtowns have blossomed even as their recession-weary outskirts struggle with soaring poverty in what amounts to a paradigm shift,” Bloomberg News reports, citing a Brookings Insitution report that finds there are now more poor people living in suburbs than in city centers.
Case in point: Ferguson, Missouri,where the poverty rate has doubled since 2000 — a trend that the world is taking notice of in the wake of protests over the Aug. 9 killing of an unarmed black teenager by police. Source: bloomberg.com.
