We’re just over midway through the hazy days of summer vacation, and children without access to high quality enrichment opportunities are already slipping behind their wealthier peers. As noted in a recent New York Times article, in addition to the decrease in math proficiency that most kids experience over the break, low-income children also lose more than two months of reading skills—skills they don’t regain during the school year. This compounds the already deep educational disparities found among students of different socioeconomic groups, which can be observed as early as 18 months of age.

Most efforts to address these gaps focus on improving our K-12 educational systems. Yet, children spend an average of 80 percent of their waking time outside of a classroom—a simple, yet startling statistic that highlights the need to explore a broader range of solutions.

As we learned at a recent Brookings event, Urban Thinkscape, an ongoing project from developmental psychologists Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, might be one of those solutions. Drawing on findings from their research on guided play—particularly from interventions like the Ultimate Block Party and The Supermarket Study—the project embeds playful learning activities, such as games and puzzles, into public places where children routinely spend time during non-school hours. Designed by architect Itai Palti, each installation is created with specific learning goals in mind and reflects best practices in psychological research.

With a pilot led by researcher Brenna Hassinger-Das in progress in the West Philadelphia Promise Zone, the project is already revealing important lessons—not only for educators, but for urban planners and policymakers as well.

The first involves the (often under-appreciated) need to work with local residents. Through meetings and focus groups with leaders of community organizations, neighbors, and Promise Zone stakeholders, the team gained a clearer understanding of resident needs, spurred interest in the project, identified potential sites, and improved designs. Residents were brought into the process early, empowered to offer suggestions at several stages, and will continue to be engaged as the project is implemented and assessed.

The upshot? When community members are meaningfully involved—and local wisdom valued—from the onset, residents become invested in the project and feel a sense of ownership of it over the long haul. This not only improves the likelihood that the project will succeed, but also helps foster neighborhood trust and cohesion, and builds social capital that can be applied to future efforts.

A second lesson is the extent to which a full scaling of the project could help transform distressed neighborhoods through what Project for Public Spaces often refers to as “lighter, quicker, cheaper” interventions.

Many high poverty urban areas are challenged with large numbers of vacant or underutilized properties, as well as dull spaces (like bus stops) that serve only utilitarian functions. The Urban Thinkscape project aims to take such spaces and remake them into opportunities for interaction and learning—and by doing so create tangible improvements to the neighborhood’s physical fabric. While the West Philadelphia pilot has substantial long-term planning behind it, ideally the “playful” installments will be refined over time so they can be more easily and cheaply implemented in other urban neighborhoods.

Finally, the Urban Thinkscape interventions have the potential to advance academic and spatial skills in children, reducing the gap in school readiness, and ultimately fostering better educational and life outcomes.

Many families in high poverty neighborhoods can’t afford extracurricular enrichment activities, particularly during the summer. And even where they might be offered—via community centers, or through other nonprofit initiatives focused on the arts, STEM activities, or sports—children may only experience them at certain times of the week. Urban Thinkscape aims to supplement these activities by embedding learning opportunities into the everyday landscape through interventions that develop numeracy, literacy, and other skills necessary to succeed in school and eventually the workforce. From an urban planning and policy perspective, this individual development is critical to helping build family wealth and vibrant, healthy city neighborhoods.

Though still nascent in its development, the Urban Thinkscape model appears to be a fun, innovative way to give children—and their caregivers—learning opportunities outside the classroom, while creating new gathering spaces and improved public places. In this way, the project is creatively employing the city itself as an agent of change. If the full vision of this work is realized, perhaps we can finally put the brakes on the “summer-slide” such that all kids can start the school year at the top of their game.

       

In this presentation Robert Puentes provides a deeper understanding of trends that are impacting metropolitan America and how those trends may impact the demand for multi-family housing in the coming decades. The presentation stresses several key points including dramatic changes in household formation, the plight of older, inner-ring "first" suburbs, and the increasing diversity reflected in both cities and suburban areas.

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Cities and suburbs occupy well-defined roles within the discussion of poverty, opportunity, and social welfare policy in metropolitan America. Research exploring issues of poverty typically has focused on central-city neighborhoods, where poverty and joblessness have been most concentrated. As a result, place-based U.S. antipoverty policies focus primarily on ameliorating concentrated poverty in inner-city (and, in some cases, rural) areas. Suburbs, by con­trast, are seen as destinations of opportunity for quality schools, safe neighborhoods, or good jobs.

Several recent trends have begun to upset this familiar urban-suburban narrative about poverty and opportunity in metropolitan America. In 1999, large U.S. cities and their suburbs had roughly equal numbers of poor residents, but by 2008 the number of suburban poor exceeded the poor in central cities by 1.5 million. Although poverty rates remain higher in central cities than in suburbs (18.2 per­cent versus 9.5 percent in 2008), poverty rates have increased at a quicker pace in suburban areas.

Watch video of co-author Scott Allard explaining the report's findings » (video courtesy of the University of Chicago)

This report examines data from the Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), along with in-depth interviews and a new survey of social services providers in suburban communities surrounding Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; and Washington, D.C. to assess the challenges that rising suburban poverty poses for local safety nets and community-based organizations. It finds that:

Suburban jurisdictions outside of Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. vary sig­nificantly in their levels of poverty, recent poverty trends, and racial/ethnic profiles, both among and within these metro areas. Several suburban counties outside of Chicago experi­enced more than 40 percent increases of poor residents from 2000 to 2008, as did portions of counties in suburban Maryland and northern Virginia. Yet poverty rates declined for subur­ban counties in metropolitan Los Angeles. While several suburban Los Angeles municipalities are majority Hispanic and a handful of Chicago suburbs have sizeable Hispanic populations, many Washington, D.C. suburbs have substantial black and Asian populations as well.

Suburban safety nets rely on relatively few social services organizations, and tend to stretch operations across much larger service delivery areas than their urban counter­parts. Thirty-four percent of nonprofits surveyed reported operating in more than one subur­ban county, and 60 percent offered services in more than one suburban municipality. The size and capacity of the nonprofit social service sector varies widely across suburbs, with 357 poor residents per nonprofit provider in Montgomery County, MD, to 1,627 in Riverside County, CA. Place of residence may greatly affect one’s access to certain types of help.

In the wake of the Great Recession, demand is up significantly for the typical suburban provider, and almost three-quarters (73 percent) of suburban nonprofits are seeing more clients with no previous connection to safety net programs. Needs have changed as well, with nearly 80 percent of suburban nonprofits surveyed seeing families with food needs more often than one year prior, and nearly 60 percent reporting more frequent requests for help with mortgage or rent payments.

Almost half of suburban nonprofits surveyed (47 percent) reported a loss in a key rev­enue source last year, with more funding cuts anticipated in the year to come. Due in large part to this bleak fiscal situation, more than one in five suburban nonprofits has reduced services available since the start of the recession and one in seven has actively cut caseloads. Nearly 30 percent of nonprofits have laid off full-time and part-time staff as a result of lost program grants or to reduce operating costs.

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Public housing has long been criticized as a breeding ground for concentrated poverty, under-achieving schools and for its lack of access to services. As a means to expand opportunity to some of the nation’s most impoverished communities, the Obama administration has proposed the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, a program that aims to take the current HOPE VI program beyond public housing by transforming these neighborhoods in a new way.

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Since December 2007, working families and communities across the country have faced an increasingly difficult economic reality. Growing unemployment and cutbacks in work hours and wages have made it harder and harder for people to make ends meet.

So the census numbers released in September really just confirmed what many Americans have already been feeling during this “Great Recession.” U.S. poverty is once again on the rise. In the first year of the downturn alone, the poor population grew by 2.6 million people to reach a total of 39.8 million, or 13.2 percent of the population.

But that’s not the whole story. The national lens obscures an important fact: place matters. Yes, 2008 brought a significant uptick in poverty, but whether or not your community was a part of this trend has a lot to do with where you live and what kind of jobs are located there.

Certain regions of the country have disproportionately borne the brunt of this recession. Areas hit hardest by the collapse of the housing market and those metro areas that depend on auto manufacturing have experienced the deepest downturns, while regions concentrated in more recession-proof industries – like educational and medical institutions or government – have fared better.

The 2008 poverty numbers reflect this varied experience. Out of the 100 largest metros areas, a little more than one in five saw a significant change in its poverty rate between 2007 and 2008, most of them increases (see map). Not surprisingly, many of these metro areas are located in California and Florida. The early timing of the burst of the housing bubble put these Sun Belt metro areas on the leading edge of what is sure to be a more widespread upward trend in poverty, reflecting a recession that deepened and spread in 2009. In contrast, metro areas like El Paso and Houston actually experienced a decline in poverty rates from 2007 to 2008, reflecting the later onset and milder effects of the downturn in much of Texas.

Although they represent regional economies, metro areas are themselves collections of cities and suburbs that do not necessarily experience poverty or respond to economic shocks uniformly.

Cities remain poorer places overall. In 2008, city residents in the 100 largest metro areas were almost twice as likely as their suburban counterparts to live in poverty—18.3 percent versus 9.5 percent. However, over the first year of the downturn, suburbs actually added more than twice as many poor people (578,000) as cities (218,000). Sun Belt suburbs – like those in the Florida metros of Lakeland, Palm Bay, Tampa, and Miami – led the list for increased poverty. These numbers reflect the fact that the suburbs are home to more people than their primary cities, but they also reflect the growing economic diversity of America’s suburbs.

In fact, an important shift has taken place in the geography of metropolitan poverty over the course of this decade. Between 2000 and 2008, the suburban poor population grew almost five times as fast as the city poor population, so that suburbs are now home to almost 1.9 million more poor people than their primary cities.

Brookings’ recent study on the “Landscape of Recession” within the country’s largest metro areas suggests that the current downturn will further accelerate the suburbanization of poverty.

More so than in the last recession, suburbs are bearing the brunt of this downturn alongside cities. City and suburban unemployment rates increased by nearly equal degrees and in May 2009 were separated by less than a percentage point—9.6 and 8.7 percent, respectively. And rather than concentrating in the older suburbs that surround cities, problems have spread to lower-density “exurbs” and “emerging suburbs” at the metropolitan fringe. These types of suburban communities showed the greatest spikes in their unemployed populations, with an increase of roughly 77 percent.

Clearly, city and suburban residents alike are experiencing increased economic stress, and the coming months and years will test the adequacy and availability of local safety net and emergency services. Here again, place makes a difference.

Case in point: as poverty increased in 2008, more families turned to food stamps (now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) to help make ends meet. Just as the poor population grew faster in the suburbs, so did SNAP receipt. And yet participation in the program remains much higher in urban counties (8.9 million recipients) than suburban counties (5.3 million recipients). This disparity raises questions about whether families in suburban communities know how to connect to safety net services like food stamps, and how accessible these services are in these communities.

Understanding the shifting local geography of poverty is a critical first step in effectively addressing its alleviation. In our largest metropolitan areas, safety net services and social service providers traditionally have been concentrated in central city neighborhoods. As the geography of metropolitan poverty continues to change, policymakers and service providers must ask whether or not the growing suburban poor population has access to the same kinds of services and programs that can help families weather downturns in the economic cycle or connect to opportunities to work their way out of poverty.

The Great Recession is only likely to exacerbate gaps between available services and growing need, as government programs and nonprofit providers struggle to do more with less. Knowing where the need is, and where it is growing fastest, can help regions more effectively align existing social services and programs to respond to the new map of metropolitan poverty.

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the online forum Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity on October 19, 2009.

      

An important federal program that tends to fly under the radar received some unprecedented real estate this past weekend--an enormous spread on page A1 of Sunday’s New York Times.

Jason DeParle’s article, and some nifty interactive maps on the Times website, portray the recent rapid growth of the food stamp program, now officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or by its rather unfortunate acronym, SNAP. DeParle documents how, in the wake of welfare reform in the mid-1990s, successive administrations--from Clinton to Bush, and now Obama--have worked in a bipartisan fashion to erase the stigma that once haunted the program, and ensure that eligible families receive access to its benefits.

Because welfare reform transformed what was an individual entitlement into a block grant to states, cash welfare caseloads in many states have remained relatively flat despite the worst recession in generations. As a result, food stamps--which remain a federal entitlement--have become an even more important countercyclical tool for fighting poverty, and enrollment has expanded by about one-third since 2007. DeParle charts that rise over the past two years across a broad cross-section of U.S. communities, all of which are feeling the economic pain of rising foreclosures, mounting job losses, and declining family incomes.

Of particular note, the article discusses the significant increases in food stamp receipt occurring in many suburban communities, now that a majority of the nation’s metropolitan poor live outside central cities. Indeed, the counties in which food stamp receipt has doubled, and which have at least 5,000 recipients today, are largely suburbs--around Atlanta, Florida’s Gulf Coast, Austin, and Youngstown. As my colleagues Elizabeth Kneebone and Emily Garr reported earlier this year, however, increases in food stamp enrollment in outer suburban counties have been somewhat lower than might be expected based on the rapid unemployment increases they have suffered. Lack of familiarity, distance to the nearest welfare office, stigma, or real eligibility differences may be to blame for under-enrollment in these farther-out areas.

All of which is to say, as food stamps become the de facto federal support system for millions of families during the next few years of elevated unemployment, plugging participation gaps in suburbia may be an important new frontier for fighting hunger and poverty in America.

      

Two years after the country entered the Great Recession, there are signs the national economy has slowly begun to recover. Thus far recovery has meant the return of economic growth, but not the return of jobs. And just as some communities have felt the downturn more than others, recovery has not and will not be shared equally across the nation’s diverse metropolitan economies.

Within metropolitan areas, many communities continue to struggle with high unemployment and increasing economic and fiscal challenges, while at the same time poverty and the need for emergency and support services continue to rise. Even under the best case scenario of a sustained and robust recovery, cities and suburbs throughout the nation will be dealing with the social and economic aftermath of such a deep and lengthy recession for some time to come.

An analysis of unemployment, initial Unemployment Insurance claims, and receipt of Supplementary Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) benefits in urban and suburban communities over the course of the Great Recession reveals that:

• Between December 2007 and December 2009, city and suburban unemployment rates in large metro areas increased by roughly the same degree (5.1 versus 4.8 percentage points, respectively). By December 2009, the gap between city and suburban unemployment rates was one percentage point (10.3 percent versus 9.3 percent)—smaller than 24 months after the start of the first recession of the decade (1.7 percentage points) and the downturn in the early 1990s (2.2 percentage points).
  
  
• Western metro areas exhibited the greatest increases in city and suburban unemployment rates—5.8 and 5.6 percentage points—over the two-year period ending in December of 2009. Increases in unemployment rates tilted more toward primary cities in Northeastern metro areas (a 5.3 percentage-point increase versus 4.2 percentage points in the suburbs), while suburbs saw slightly larger increases in the South (5.0 versus 4.4 percentage points).
  
  
• Initial Unemployment Insurance (UI) claims increased considerably between December 2007 and December 2009 in urban and suburban areas alike. The largest increases in requests for UI occurred in the first year of the downturn—led by lower-density suburbs—with new claims beginning to taper off between December of 2008 and 2009.
  
  
• SNAP receipt increased steeply and steadily between January 2008 and July 2009 across both urban and suburban counties. Urban counties remain home to the largest number of SNAP recipients, though suburban counties saw enrollment increase at a slightly faster pace during the downturn—36.1 percent compared to 29.4 percent in urban counties.
  

Even as signs point to a tentative economic recovery for the nation, metropolitan areas throughout the country continue to struggle with high unemployment. Within these regions, the negative effects of this downturn—as measured by changes in unemployment and demand for safety net services—have been shared across cities and suburbs alike. Standardizing sub-state data collection and reporting across programs would better enable policymakers and services providers to effectively track indicators of recovery and need in the nation’s largest labor markets.

Read the Full Paper » (PDF)
Read the Related Report: Job Sprawl and the Suburbanization of Poverty »

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Martha Ross spoke to the Advisory Board of the Community Foundation for Prince George’s County, describing research on the suburbanization of poverty both nationally and in the Washington region.

Despite perceptions that economic distress is primarily a central city phenomenon, suburbs are home to increasing numbers of low-income families. She highlighted the need to strengthen the social service infrastructure in suburban areas.

Full Presentation on Poverty in the Washington-Area Suburbs » (PDF)

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