Why are there are now more people living in poverty outside big cities than in them?
Ron Blatman
Executive Producer/Producer at Saving the City: Remaking the American Metropolis documentary series
The shift is partly due to the rising popularity and rising cost of close to downtown neighborhoods. ?There is also the growth of job opportunities in the suburbs. ?Another reason is the disappearance of traditional public housing from urban centers.
With the advent of HUD's Hope VI program in the mid-1990s followed by the similar Choice Neighborhoods of today, scores of public housing projects have been remade as mixed-income communities, often with new schools, community centers and recreation facilities. ?
The goal was to break the entrenched cycles of poverty found in these places and it's mostly been successful, but there's been another impact – many of those formerly in public housing have moved to surrounding suburbs. ?
Hear from Georgia Tech professor Ellen Dunham-Jones about the suburbanization of poverty:
We interviewed Henry Cisneros, the former HUD secretary behind Hope VI, Elinor Bacon, who ran HUD's initial Hope VI effort, developers of mixed income housing, and a range of residents in both the US and Canada for a story about such neighborhood transformations.
Please help us complete the first four 60-minute episodes of the Saving the City series about how to make cities better places. – Series Overview, Housing, Parks and Family Friendly – DONATE.
Atlanta's Villages at East Lake on a former public housing site is below:?
On the production front, we're recently back from filming in Charlotte, Birmingham and Atlanta and are now planning our next shoot in San Francisco.
Abandoned residences line a street in suburban East Cleveland below:
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Thanks to generous funding from the William Penn, Packard, Hewlett, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia Foundations, Heinz Endowments, an Urban Land Institute leadership group and individuals led by George Miller & Janet McKinley, Chris Larsen & Lyna Lam, and Jordan & Sarah Hymowitz, we have raised over $971,000 to date. A more complete list of contributors is here.
A big Thank You! to Tom and Jamel Perkins of San Francisco for again generously contributing to the production.
CITY QUOTE?
“I don't think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities.”
Matthew Desmond – author, sociologist, Princeton professor
FUN FACT
At 874 square miles, the consolidated city and county of Jacksonville is the largest municipality by land area in the US.
GOOD READS
Copyright 2025 ? Ronald M. Blatman, Inc. All rights reserved.