Slumburbia Is Real
For years now, affluent (mostly white) Americans have been moving back into our nation's "inner cities," those once-scary locations populated only by forgotten minorities and a distinct lack of quality condo development. And poor people, in turn, have been decamping for the suburbs, those once-deluxe bastions of white flight. Slumburbia is no longer our future. It is our present.
From a new Brookings Institution report, via the LA Times:
As poverty mounted throughout the nation over the past decade, the number of poor people living in suburbs surged 67% between 2000 and 2011 — a much bigger jump than in cities, researchers for the Brookings Institution said in a book published today. Suburbs still have a smaller percentage of their population living in poverty than cities do, but the sheer number of poor people scattered in the suburbs has jumped beyond that of cities.
Imagine: your children will be unable to relate to the idea of suburbs as soulless vortexes of consumption-driven anomie, and unable to relate to the idea of inner cities as dangerous poverty-stricken hellholes. They won't understand any 90s music at all.
