Addressing the needs of the suburban poor

In regards to “suburb,” many Americans have strong cultural ideas of what constitutes a “suburb.” The typical image includes post-World War II tract housing built for car-owning families, cul de sacs, and shopping malls. Yet, suburbs are actually extremely heterogeneous in their demographic composition, economy, and land use patterns; most bear little resemblance to these stereotypical images. Given such diversity, perhaps it is fitting, then, that there is no formal or official definition of “suburb” in the United States. In some cases, researchers follow the standard used by the U.S. Census Bureau, which defines suburbs as municipalities with populations greater than 2,500, that are located in metropolitan statistical areas, and that are not central cities. In other cases, the definition of “suburb” that researchers use depends on the available data and the research questions being asked. For example, in Murphy and Wallace’s study of antipoverty organizational deprivation across urban and suburban areas, they define suburbs as zip codes that exist within this census definition. Zip codes are used as the unit of analysis because they are the smallest spatial unit at which the data is available. In Allard’s work on suburban poverty and the safety net, however, he uses tract-based definitions to capture demographic change and county-level definitions of urban versus suburban because counties are a key administrative unit for most safety net programs. How researchers decide to define “suburb” typically does little to change our understanding of how the geography of poverty has changed in the last 20 years. Differences in how urban and suburban places are defined matter, however, when exploring more nuanced aspects of suburban poverty and when comparing findings across different studies.