Patchwork places : regional and historical variations in suburban poverty in the United States

Abstract

The majority share of metropolitan poverty in the United States has shifted from cities to suburbs through the effects of employment losses and the movement of lower-income populations. However, varied histories of suburban development, class and racial/ethnic divisions within and among suburbs, and widening suburban inequality all suggest that understanding suburban poverty requires moving beyond a simplified view of low-income suburbs as a uniform set. Suburbs are embedded in regions and have different degrees of connection to their associated metropolitan areas. These differences hint that symptoms of economic disadvantage in suburbs today are historically related to local patterns of social and economic development, prompting the central question of this dissertation: How have location and regional development histories shaped the economic trajectories of suburbs that could today be considered poor? The nature of the research question lent itself to a mixed-methods analysis of past and present suburban development. In the first part of this study I developed a five-category typology for more than 2000 low-income suburban Census Places. Mapping each category showed identifiable regional patterns suggesting a potential connection between major historical development processes and present-day spatial arrangements of poor suburbs. In the second part, I used the typology to select five case studies. Guided by a theoretical framework employing geological language of flows, deposits, and waves, I analyzed these individual locations whose narratives are engrained in regional and national processes of place formation but mediated by the expansive development cycles of the 20th century. My research demonstrates that poor suburbs are multilayered, contingent processes with links back to the selection of their spatial locations and the functions established in their earliest years of settlement. I argue that bound up in the socioeconomic status of individual suburbs are spatio-historical roots of those conditions. The variables contributing to change in suburbs do not simply move through time, but through space-time among a network of interdependent places. The economic development history of a suburb interweaves with its spatial location nested in different geographical scales to create its defining characteristics at any point in time. Strategies to address suburban poverty must therefore be contextualized and interscalar as well as backward and forward looking.