Across the United States, the suburbs have often been synonymous with affluence. But a new publication from Brookings titled Confronting Suburban Poverty highlights that “the poor population in America’s suburbs is growing faster than anywhere else in the country, surging 64 percent in the past decade and growing at more than twice the rate of the urban poor population.” Authors Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube raise many concerning issues with one particularly relevant to transportation advocates: many suburban communities lack the transit and walking  infrastructure prevalent in dense urban places.

Brookings’ findings are displayed as a national infographic and as fact sheets for the 100 largest metropolitan regions. Metro areas in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut fare better than the US as a whole when comparing the percentage of residents in low-income suburbs with transit access: nationally, 76.9 percent of residents in low-income suburbs have transit access; in the tri-state region, the percentages are:

• 88.2 percent (Hartford CT metropolitan region)
• 94.1 percent (New York-Newark NY-NJ-PA metropolitan region)
• 94.4 percent (Philadelphia PA-NJ-DE-MD metropolitan region)
• 95.6 percent (Bridgeport-Stamford CT metropolitan region)
• 99.8 percent (New Haven CT metropolitan region)

While some of the tri-state region’s metro areas have higher transit access rates than the rest of the country, in many instances they fare worse in terms of the share of jobs accessible within a 90 minute or less transit trip. At the national level, 25 percent of jobs are accessible within 90 minutes on transit. In our communities:

• 19.2 percent (Philadelphia PA-NJ-DE-MD)
• 20.5 percent (New Haven CT)
• 29.9 percent (Bridgeport-Stamford CT)
• 27.9 percent (Hartford CT)
• 32.1 percent (New York-Newark NY-NJ-PA)

Confronting Suburban Poverty underscores that economic livelihood is tied to transit that gets people to jobs and is accessible to their place of residence. As the Center for Neighborhood Technology has shown, households in location-efficient communities – places with good access to transit, jobs and amenities – tend to spend a lower percentage of their income on housing and transportation than their counterparts in car-dependent areas. Furthermore, as Ford Foundation President Luis Ubiñas noted in a webinar accompanying the book release, by physically connecting residents to jobs, neighborhoods, the community and their families, transit systems help to keep people from further descending into poverty. Despite transit being an important resource across the tri-state area, suburban transit systems have been cut and fares have been raised in recent years, negatively impacting the region’s most vulnerable populations.

And because vehicle ownership may not be a possibility for poorer households, the increase in low-income suburban populations necessitates investment in pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure. After all, you can’t have a robust transit system if there isn’t a safe way of getting to and from rail stations and bus stops.