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作者

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS,Vol.41,Issue2,P.268-270

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

University of Georgia

摘要

Scott W. Allard’s Places in Need is essential reading for academics, policymakers, and journalists who continue to confine metropolitan poverty to urban places. This book confirms and adds to recent studies on the demographic changes in suburban places and a longer history of research on suburban diversity that disrupts popular notions of a homogeneous suburbia. Places in Need adds to this research through Allard’s interviews with public and nonprofit social service practitioners about the challenges they face in suburban places; their perceptions about what demographic, social, and physical characteristics of areas they describe as urban and suburban; the limitations of the local and metropolitan safety net; and an evaluation of three federally funded safety net programs: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).Allard’s demographic analysis confirms that more poor people now live in the suburbs than in urban areas, describes the racial dimension of suburban poverty, and compares employment and demographic changes of low-income people in suburban places before and after the Great Recession. An important contribution of Allard’s book vis-à-vis other studies on suburban poverty is his deliberate emphasis on the enduring need in urban places. Places in Need shows that although poverty is becoming increasingly prevalent in new places, it has not left the old ones. Overall, I believe that Places in Need is an important resource for anyone interested in metropolitan studies and poverty.The Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings began documenting increasing suburban poverty in its 2003 report titled Stunning Progress, Hidden Problems (Jargowsky, 2003), and it has spurred a small but growing body of suburban scholarship, which Allard describes as the “Brookings effect” (p. 11). Within this group of studies, scholars have highlighted a number of challenges: interjurisdictional competition for tax revenues, a sparse social service infrastructure, lack of affordable housing, inadequate public transportation, and a history of suburbs as places predominantly middle-class in character.Through his interviews with more than 100 nonprofit leaders in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and Chicago, Allard provides the most comprehensive inquiry to date on the challenges suburban social service providers face with respect to “the fragmentation of suburban government and the transportation challenges for both clients and staff” (p. 172). I consider the practitioner interviews especially helpful because they are on the front lines of the metropolitan safety net. However, I wish that the book had included interviews with the suburban poor, as well.According to Allard, many high-poverty counties have a “relatively weak indigenous nonprofit social service infrastructure” (p. 136). Consequently, the lack of nonprofit organizations contributes to the “stark difference in the resources available to urban versus suburban poor” (p. 141). As such, the suburban poor are often rendered invisible and forgotten due to the “perception gap” (p. 149) that middle-class or affluent people have of suburbs. The preceding makes it hard for service providers to fundraise and, in turn, to address existing needs.Allard includes a quantitative analysis of TANF’s, SNAP’s, and EITC’s effectiveness in responding to the shifting geography of poverty. He argues that fragmentation, underfunding, and intra-metropolitan competition among jurisdictions vying for limited resources result in a safety net unequipped for the growing need. Decentralized initiatives with greater local discretion, such as TANF, have been less effective at helping suburban communities meet rising need, whereas more closely regulated, federally funded programs with less local control like SNAP and the EITC have responded better. Allard warns that any attempt to block grants or cut back the safety net will result in less effective antipoverty programs, exacerbate funding pressures for local jurisdictions, and widen the need gap. Allard’s warnings are timely given cutbacks proposed by the Trump administration.Allard is correct that notions of poverty and place reliant on a city–suburb dichotomy are outdated, but in my view, he overstates the degree to which this fact is misunderstood. His documentation of urban and suburban poverty research in figures 1.4 and 1.5 span the period from 1990 to 2010, but significant research on this subject has occurred since 2011.I appreciated pages 20–28 where Allard asks and tries to answer the question: What is urban? He finds that interviewees’ perceptions of “urban” versus “suburban” places were more closely linked to race, poverty, crime, education, and density rather than to existing political boundaries. Unfortunately, he abandons this interesting lens outside of this brief section.As a geographer, I would quibble with Allard’s inconsistent definition of urban and suburban. In his demographic analyses (Chapter 3), Allard defines urban as the municipal boundary of the primary city and all other metropolitan census tracts as suburban. This is problematic, in part, because census tracts often straddle municipal boundaries. But my broader concern is the incompatibility with other sections of the book. What Allard classifies as a suburb is a moving target depending on which chapter you are reading. Allard’s multiple conceptualizations of suburbia complicate the difficulty of addressing increased suburban need. Although the main point of this otherwise useful book is the need to be clear in talking about suburban places, Places in Need fails to provide us with a consistent approach.ReferenceJargowsky, P. A. (2003). Stunning progress, hidden problems: The dramatic decline of concentrated poverty in the 1990s. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. [Google Scholar]