Nearly 70,000 suburban residents of Little Rock’s metropolitan area live in poverty, an increase of more than 50 percent over the past decade as revealed in a new book detailing how America’s suburbs are becoming the primary home of the nation’s poor.
The six-county Little Rock metropolitan area was among 86 major metropolitan areas that experienced significant growth in suburban poverty populations over the past decade, according to the book published last week by researchers at the Brookings Institution, an agency that describes itself as an independent policy researchnonprofit.
Nationwide, about 3 million more poor Americans live in the suburbs now than in the nation’s big cities, a growing shift to bedroom communities that researchers say is partly the result of low-income residents being pushed out of gentrifying inner cities and being drawn in from dying rural areas.
Elizabeth Kneebone, who co-authored the book Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, said all kinds of suburbs are struggling with increasing poverty.
“It’s not just inner-ring places or places right over the city line that are seeing this uptick,” she said. “It’s also farther-out places and more traditional bedroomcommunities or traditionally more affluent places that people don’t look to see these trends or expect to see them.”
The researchers classified urban areas as the principal city in a metropolitan area, as well as any other city in the area that had a population of at least 100,000.
In ce ntral Arka nsas,Little Rock was the only city defined as urban. Other cities such as Conway, Benton, Jacksonville and North Little Rock were considered suburban areas.
Suburban poverty across the nation has grown since the 1980s, but until the turn of the century, cities were still home to the largest share of the nation’s poor.
In the past decade, Kneebone said, a combination of low-income residents moving into suburban areas and longterm residents “slipping down the economic ladder” drove up the poverty populations in suburban areas.
Layoffs, the collapsed housing market and the recession of 2008-09 have only exacerbated things in the past few years, Kneebone said.
In 2011, 16.4 million people were living in poverty in the nation’s suburbs, compared with 13.4 million in the cities of the nation’s metropolitan areas. That year, the poverty threshold was slightly more than $23,000 for a family of four.
In the Little Rock metropolitan area, there were 102,428 poor residents in 2011, about two-thirds of them living in suburban areas. The Little Rock metropolitan area includes North Little Rock and Conway, as well as Pulaski, Saline, Faulkner, Lonoke, Grant and Perry counties.
According to the Brookings research, Little Rock’s suburbs and bedroom communities such as Conway, Jacksonville and North Little Rock have all seen increases in their poverty rates since 2000.
In Sherwood, Benton and Cabot, poverty rates in 2000 were between 6 percent and 8 percent. A decade later, the rates are between 10 percent and 12 percent.
And in Cabot, the poor population has more than doubled, the largest increase among the central Arkansas cities in the metropolitan area.
In 2000, there were 1,066 Cabot residents living in poverty. In 2011, that number rose to about 2,592 people, a 143 percent increase that now indicates that at least one in 10 of the city’s residents lives below the poverty line.
Cabot Mayor Bill Cypert said the increase isn’t something that’s become a large topic of discussion in the town of about 23,000.
Cabot’s schools have seen an increase in the number of students receiving subsidized lunches, he said, but those signs haven’t triggered much public reaction.
More residents have commented on another subtle but telling sign, he said.
“For the first time, it’s really been noticeable that there are homeless people in Cabot,” he said. “Ten years ago, it was probably rare to say, ‘There’s a homeless person.’”
The city has also seen more people turn to low-income housing.
At the Cabot Housing Authority, executive director Alan Turnbo said that because the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sets fair market rent reimbursement rates for the whole Metropolitan Statistical Area, a tenant or family can get more for their voucher in the outlying areas.
“It costs so stinking much tolive anymore, that an unskilled working family can’t make it,” Turnbo said. “Our rents are still cheaper here than they are in Little Rock, and we don’t use the full fair market rent reimbursement because we don’t have to. We can serve more people that way.”
Public housing authorities track the need for fair market housing in several ways, but some of the most reliable indicators include the lengthof-wait lists for services and Section 8 low-income housing vouchers - both the number granted by HUD and the number transferred to or from other housing agencies.
Many area housing authorities in Lonoke, Faulkner, Pulaski and Saline counties open their waiting lists for new applications for only a few days a year, and some haven’t opened them at all for the past two years because of the outstanding need.
In Jacksonville, which had a poverty rate of 20 percent in 2011, the waiting list for housing was opened for only two days before it was full last year, said Phil Nix, executive director of the Jacksonville Housing Authority. Nix said the wait list for fewer than 400 allottedvouchers is 300 people deep.
“We keep a list of apartment housing and dependable landlords to refer people to if they call for help because we’re so backed up on the wait list,” he said. “It’s partly because of the air base, but Jacksonville has somewhere in the neighborhood of 37 percent rental housing.”
Jacksonville had few people ask to transfer vouchers in 2012, but the story was different in Conway, where 43 vouchers were transferred to the Conway Public Housing Authority last year.
Executive Director Mary Boyd said there’s not a lot of rhyme or reason for where people are arriving from.
“We have a couple people from Little Rock and North Little Rock, but not that many; that’s not where it’s coming from,” she said.
HUD allows residents receiving Section 8 vouchers to transfer those vouchers to another housing authority. To keep and transfer a voucher, a tenant must have lived in a city for more than a year and have paid his portion of rent for that year.
The Conway authority received requests from all overthe country, including New Orleans, Los Angeles, New York, Dallas and Denver, but also from all over the state, including Jonesboro, Fort Smith, Searcy, Springdale, West Memphis, Blytheville, Brinkley and Russellville.
“Some of it is family that they can lean on or ask for help live here,” Boyd said. “Some of it is having educational opportunities here. Some of it is people coming from smaller communities where there isn’t as much opportunity for jobs. It’s hard to know the reason, but we do have a lot of people [transferring] in.”
The housing officials’ experience coincides with what Kneebone said is another driver of the growing poor populations in suburbs. Movers from rural areas or out-of-state are seeking housing in suburbanareas and bypassing the cities altogether.
In Little Rock’s metropolitan area, that appears to be a trend, Kneebone said.
But Little Rock’s metropolitan area isn’t seeing the shock from poverty shifts that many of the nation’s other large cities such as Atlanta are. Researchers say Atlanta experienced the biggest shift in its poor from the city to the suburbs between 1970 and 2011.
The population growth around Little Rock has been much more evenly distributed than in other major cities, said Michael Pakko, the chief economist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Institute for Economic Advancement.
Unlike cities such as St. Louis and Memphis, Little Rock has continued to grow along with its suburban population.
“Outlying suburbs have grown faster than the central urban area, but the core has continued to grow,” Pakko said.
Growth in suburban areas is to be expected, Pakko said, because poverty increased in all locations after the recession. And in many suburban areas, the growth rate is much bigger because poverty was previously relatively low there, he said.
Pakko also said that comparing 2000, a relatively strong economic year, with 2011, which followed a deep recession, could lead to some overestimation of the poverty increase in the central Arkansas suburbs.
But even the addition of a few thousand poor residents in a suburb can make a big difference in resources for small communities, Kneebone said. And the perception of suburbs as home to only the middle class and affluent needs to be discarded.
“There is a lag in where need is now and where people think it is,” she said.
“The risk is not changing the way we address these issues to match today’s scope of the need. If we don’t, then we risk re-creating challenges that cities have dealt with for decades - creating more pockets of isolated poverty in suburbs, which threatens more entrenched struggles,” she said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/26/2013