Poverty is on the Move, but Services Stay Put

As any parent will tell you, mobility is a game-changer. Once junior can crawl, gone are the days of leaving him on his playmat while you step away, however briefly, and expect him to be in the same spot playing with the safe and developmentally appropriate toys you left him with. No, he’d rather be exploring the shoes you left in the corner of room with his mouth or in pursuit of the family cat. What worked before has to be reexamined to be successful once mobility enters the picture. 

Our view of poverty, however, is often much more limited. Monday morning on NPR, Pam Fessler joined Brookings’ Elizabeth Kneebone on a tour of Montgomery County, MD to discuss the suburbanization of poverty. Once understood to be an urban condition, the suburbs have seen rapid growth in the rates of poverty in the last couple of decades as low-income families have moved out in search of jobs and affordable housing and formerly middle-class families were hit by the collapse of the housing bubble and unemployment due to the recession. This geographic shift can create challenges for families seeking support since the infrastructure of services is much less developed in the suburbs where the demand is a more recent phenomenon. Not only can resource centers be harder to find, the distance to them and lack of convenient transportation can make them harder to get to. The story notes that one-stop shops that provide benefit screening are popping up to meet some of the need, but this lack of access highlights a larger issue: the systems that are in place to provide help when needed are often build around outdated understandings of poverty. 

This is true not just of our understanding of the geographic mobility of poor people, it’s also true of the upward and downward economic mobility of poor people. The bad news is is that over 50 percent of Americans will experience a bout of poverty before they turn 65. The good news is that half will rise above the poverty line within a year and three-quarters within four years. This dynamic is also reflected in the usage of public benefits. From 2004-2006, for example half of all new SNAP participants left the program within a ten months. Program rules, however, penalize participants for having savings, requiring them to spend down what they have to be eligible and prevent them from saving while participating. In some states, this limit can be as low as $1,000, providing little buffer between an unexpected loss of income or unexpected expense and poverty. This can cost families their own self-made safety net that will help them move out of poverty and off of programs in the future. Without acknowledging the constant movement of people in an out of poverty, programs that ideally provide temporary support can lock families in as they move down instead of giving them traction on their way up.

Adaptable programs, much like adaptable parents, ensure good outcomes. Our system of public benefits and institutions that provide these necessary services should be designed to be responsive to what we know to be the dynamic lives of people in poverty.