Why Suburban Poverty Is Less Visible and More Insidious

We've been talking today – both at Atlantic Cities and across town with our Washington, D.C. neighbors the Brookings Institution – about the suburbanization of poverty in America, a geographic trend particularly notable for two reasons: It confounds our long-entrenched stereotypes of suburbia as the home of the American dream, and it creates a dramatic mismatch between the social services infrastructure we began building during the War on Poverty and the poor people who now live nowhere near it.

As Luis Ubiñas, the president of the Ford Foundation, put it today at a Brookings event releasing a new book on the topic by Alan Berube and Elizabeth Kneebone: "Today's poverty is no less painful. But it looks different."