Mitchell Duneier Alexandra Murphy Princeton University
This ethnographic community study seeks to move beyond existing economic and demographic descriptive snapshots of the new suburban poverty phenomenon. Using Penn Hills, PA, a Pittsburgh suburb, as a case-study, three primary questions guide this research: (1) How is poverty socially organized and what is everyday life like for the suburban poor?; (2) How is the social and economic life of the wider community organized around poverty in the suburbs?; and (3) To what extent are these suburban neighborhoods economically, politically, and socially isolated from broader metropolitan networks? The focus is on African American poverty. Suburbs do not feature many of the neighborhood characteristics observed to be important in shaping the lives of the urban poor (e.g. public space and the presence of antipoverty organizations). Given these significant differences, one cannot assume that what is known about urban poverty will translate to the suburbs. This research builds upon existing theories of urban sociology by taking questions asked of urban poverty to the suburbs. In doing so, the researchers are interested in three different suburban actors: (1) poor residents, (2) institutions, and (3) local government. With respect to poor residents what do differences in the suburban built environment mean for three features of daily life important to the poor: (1) the creation of networks and subsistence strategies, (2) access to antipoverty organizations, and (3) neighborhood social control. To better measure the political and economic location of the suburb in the broader metropolitan ecology the study will also research a wide range of suburban institutions (churches, business, schools, and community organizations) and the municipal government. The study?s focus is on the challenges that poverty places on these institutions and the resources and networks they use to meet these challenges.
Broader Impact: By being one of the first ethnographic studies of the new suburban poverty, this research will be a critical component of what will surely be a rising field of social science scholarship across disciplines: suburban poverty. The research will also shed significant light on existing urban poverty research and debates by refining the particular built environment and institutional factors that uniquely shape urban versus suburban poverty. Further, by publishing and presenting findings in academic and public forums, this research will make important public policy contributions. It has been argued that suburban poverty exists in a ?policy blind spot.? We may only begin to address the problems of suburban poverty adequately if we understand what life is like for the suburban poor. By working to understand these dimensions of suburban poverty this research will help us to understand the ways in which current policies are not useful for the suburban poor, identify gaps in local, state, and federal policies, illuminate various stakeholders and suburban particularities around which policies should be shaped, and help us to craft tools appropriate to the contours of the lived realities of the poor in these places.
The geography of poverty in the United States has undergone a dramatic shift. In 2000, for the first time in American history, the greatest share of poor people lived in the suburbs. This shift raises important, unexamined questions about what daily life is like for the suburban poor, how suburbs are adapting to their rising poverty rates, and how sociological theories about urban poverty translates to the suburbs. I draw on over three years of fieldwork in one Pittsburgh suburb experiencing rising black poverty to examine these questions. To carry out the project, I lived in a poor black neighborhood in the bedroom suburb under study. I conducted participant observation of social life in churches, laundromats, parking lots, businesses, and bus stops. I followed six poor families, intensively observing their everyday lives. This was supplemented by a survey of households on three different blocks of concentrated poverty. To study organizational life, I interned in the municipal planning department, served as the NAACP secretary, assisted the community development corporation, rode regularly with code enforcement and police, volunteered in food pantries, observed meetings of civic organizations, and observed institutions outside of the suburb important to the distribution of resources there. The ethnography is supplemented with analyses of spatial data and primary documents. The research reveals that for poor African Americans, a move to the suburbs does not promise the opportunities for upward mobility, dignity, and prestige that it did for the white middle classes who suburbanized before them. Instead, structures of inequality become reproduced in the suburbs in ways that create new obstacles and disadvantages for poor people and the neighborhoods where they live. Specifically, I find that poor residents experience extreme social isolation. People live far from trusted family and friends whom they might rely on to make ends meet. In their absence, they turn to neighbors to get by; deep distrust exists in these networks. Those without cars and work spend extraordinary amounts of time in their home. To travel off their block, they surrender themselves to the control and demands of people willing to give them rides, undermining any ability to maintain privacy or autonomy in the eyes of neighbors they do not trust. Physical distance combined with limited public transportation leaves residents disconnected from the organizational life of the community, compromising their ability to build social capital and access the few social services available. Organizations and politics play a crucial role in creating inequality in the suburb. Poor residents live in neighborhoods that are disconnected from municipal arenas of decision-making and resource distribution. In part this is because of the physical design of the suburb. Organizations, like churches, businesses, and the library, are zoned outside of residential neighborhoods and onto main commercial roads. As such, they do not function as "neighborhood organizations" that can play a middleman role (Marwell 2007), helping residents draw attention to the neighborhood. This is not the case for the white middle class who garner clout and resources from living in neighborhoods with civic organizations that have survived since their founding as women’s garden clubs. The landscape of social service provision contributes to inequality as well. There is a significant dearth of antipoverty organizations. Frozen funding streams make it difficult for new organizations to develop and those that do exist to expand their services. As poverty grows and enters into new neighborhoods, this results in a mismatch between where services are provided and where people who need them live. The organizations that most touch the poverty problem thus know little about the landscape of need in the community; this contributes to suburban poverty being in a "policy blindspot." A critical piece of the suburban poverty story is that poor people are not residing in middle class suburbs. Instead, they live in suburbs like the one under study that have also grown poorer. The pervasiveness of scarcity presents material challenges to institutions and networks designed to promote suburban middle class lifestyles, but which must now contend with problems of poverty and blight. Further, such scarcity contrasts greatly with enduring beliefs longtime residents and policy makers outside the community have of suburban prosperity. The theoretical and policy-relevant implications of these findings are many. The research shows that a move away from deleterious aspects of city life, like violence, heavy policing, residential instability, and concentrated poverty, does not result in enhanced social capital or improved life chances as scholars would have predicted. Instead, for poor people, suburban living entails complicated tradeoffs. Fears of neighborhood violence are replaced with anxieties over how to access needed assistance, meet daily appointments, and procure food without transportation. By illuminating how structures of inequality often considered to be "urban" become reproduced in new and seemingly very different spaces, the research raises important questions about what, if anything, is unique about urban poverty.
