Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Contrary to the familiar urban-suburban narrative about poverty in the U.S., there are more poor persons in the suburbs of American cities than in the cities themselves. Poverty rates remain higher in cities, but suburbs are coping with poverty problems thought to be distinctly urban. Apart from its demographic importance, the changing spatial distribution of poverty in America poses challenges to the federal, state, and local institutions that compose the antipoverty safety net. Much of the American welfare state’s public and private capacity to assist the poor is concentrated in central cities, leaving areas outside of cities with less active and engaged help-giving institutions and organizations. This paper discusses the political economy of contemporary safety net assistance, focusing on provision of public assistance programs often at the core of political science inquiry and on less frequently discussed local nonprofit programs of assistance that receive over $100 billion annually. I then use a unique set of census, administrative, and nonprofit data to examine the variation in safety net provision across the urban, suburban, and rural landscape. While certain federal programs, like food stamps, are structured to be responsive to the changing geography of poverty, the nonprofit safety net fails to be responsive. Apart from pointing to challenging the conventional spatial discourse around poverty, this paper identifies a host of new questions for scholars of public policy and federalism.