Volatility and Change in Suburban Nonprofit Safety Nets

Abstract

Poverty in U.S. suburbs surged to historic highs in the early part of the twenty-first century. Although poverty was on the rise in many suburban areas during the 1990s, the recession of 2001 and the Great Recession that ended in 2009 led to dramatic increases in the number of poor people living in suburbs (Berube and Kneebone 2013). Scott Allard (2017) finds that suburbs in the largest hundred metropolitan Volatility and Change in Suburban NonprofitSafety Nets scot t w. a ll a r d a nd eliz a betH pelletier Rising poverty in suburbs has led to increased interest in how well suburban safety nets function. Apart from public assistance programs, community-based nonprofit health and human service organizations play a central role in suburban efforts to address racial and economic inequalities. Understanding how nonprofit services are distributed across the suburban and urban landscape, therefore, is critical to assessing how communities may be able to address need. In this paper, we examine the presence and volatility of nonprofit health and human service expenditures in suburban and urban counties across the United States from 2000 to 2017. We find the nonprofit safety net to be more responsive in urban centers than in suburban places, and less robust in suburban areas experiencing high rates of poverty or with a larger share of residents who are Black. Nonprofit health and human service spending also appears less countercyclical than is commonly understood. Suburban-urban disparities in nonprofit health and human service spending persist after controlling for several county-level demographic and socioeconomic factors.

The Suburbanization of Eviction: Increasing Displacement and Inequality Within American Suburbs

“…Fourth, we need more research that explores how the lived experience of eviction plays out differently for suburban and urban tenants. Suburban tenants have far less access to the social service nonprofits that could help avoid eviction in the first place through financial or legal assistance or mitigate eviction's most harmful repercussions such as prolonged homelessness, job loss, and lasting health deficits (Allard and Pelletier 2023;Murphy and Wallace 2010). How does that affect their experience of the eviction process?…”

“…Lowincome suburbanites are more likely to struggle with food insecurity than their urban peers, a problem exacerbated by the logistical challenges of reaching a more limited set of food pantries and nonprofits (Allard et al 2017;Shannon et al 2018). Poor suburban residents face much greater challenges accessing social service organizations, particularly those intended to alleviate hardship or promote upward mobility (Allard and Pelletier 2023;Murphy and Wallace 2010;Allard 2009). Indeed, most suburban towns lack a single social service nonprofit of any kind (Allard and Roth 2010).…”

Classification and Spatial Differentiation of Subdistrict Units for Sustainable Urban Renewal in Megacities: A Case Study of Chengdu

“…In fact, in the complex urban renewal process, relying solely on government power to fully control environmental remediation and conduct socioeconomic regeneration is extremely difficult; it is necessary to explore and guide social forces effectively. At the same time, the relatively stable resident structure and higher-level living needs of CR-type units provide a good foundation for public participation [47,48]. Therefore, promoting the contribution of renewal entities to greater social forces through participatory grassroots governance is an essential means of realizing urban renewal in high-density central areas.…”