AJC: Poverty Moves Fast Into The Suburbs

AJC: Poverty moves fast 
to suburbs

Poverty is growing quicker across the Atlanta region than just about anywhere else in the country.

From Butts County in the south to Dawson up north, Walton in the east to Haralson out west, the number of poor people grew exponentially faster the past decade in the suburbs than in metro Atlanta itself.

In 2000, for example, 76 percent of the Atlanta region’s poor lived in the suburbs. In 2008, 85 percent did. Only five U.S. suburbs notched a greater rise in their percentage of poor people during that time period, according to a myth-busting report by a Washington think tank.

And all that happened before the recession tore a hole in metro Atlanta’s civic fabric, with layoffs and foreclosures sundering once-stable communities.

More than half a million people in Atlanta’s suburbs now live below the poverty line. Put another way, one of every eight suburbanites is poor.

Poverty, of course, isn’t new. Atlanta and its near-in suburbs‚ Fulton, Cobb, Gwinnett, DeKalb and Clayton‚ have dealt with the financial scourge for years.

What’s different, according to the study by the Brookings Institution, is the speed with which poverty has spread across the 28-county Atlanta metropolitan area. And it’s everywhere.

In Canton, 30 miles from downtown Atlanta, white-collar Joes compete with teenagers for jobs stacking shelves at the grocery store.

In Marietta, near the Square, a Hispanic preacher counts dozens of unemployed construction workers.

In Buford, hidden behind the antebellum mansions along Main Street, 25 boxes of donated bread are picked clean within the hour at the food pantry.

“It seems like there’s a new crowd here every time I come,” Marcus Miller, 32 and unemployed, said after filling a grocery bag Wednesday at the North Gwinnett Co-Op. “There’s diversity in these faces; they’re not any specific race. It doesn’t matter if you speak English or not. They’re all here. The elderly. The young. It doesn’t matter who you are.”

Poverty’s rush to the suburbs portends far-reaching social, political and economic consequences.

Yet, while the suburbs suffer, Atlanta stabilizes: its poverty rate remained the same between 2000 and 2008‚ compared to a 25 percent increase in suburban poverty, according to the Brookings report released earlier this month.