The GOP War on the Suburbs

If one looks at the agenda of the modern day Republican Party, its main focus is on tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and a severe slashing of social programs and government infrastructure spending.  Ironically, these policies increasingly attack the suburbs which are the trues battleground for political victory.  Outside of rural areas and wealthy enclaves, it's the suburbs that elect Republicans.  Yet despite this reality, poverty is increasing in suburban areas and the GOP is adverse to any policies that might help the battered middle class.  The question becomes one of when will suburban voters realize that the GOP is actually their enemy.  A piece in Politico looks at the changes over taking the suburbs and the damage being done by the GOP's policies.  Here are excerpts:

[S]uburbs define our politics, too. While city dwellers overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and residents of small towns and rural areas vote for Republicans by large margins, suburbs are the quintessential political battlegrounds.

But now suburbs are helping define another American phenomenon: poverty. Over the past decade, America’s major suburbs have become home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country. Between 2000 and 2011, the number of poor residents in suburbia grew by almost two-thirds, or 64 percent — more than double the pace of poverty growth in the large cities that anchor these regions. For the first time, more poor people in America live in suburbs than in big cities.

Despite poverty’s increasing suburbanization and bipartisan character, it is not exactly catching fire as a key issue on Capitol Hill. One recent debate in which poverty has surfaced most prominently concerns the reauthorization of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, with the House GOP leadership advancing a proposal to cut $40 billion in spending over 10 years. The burden of those cuts would fall more squarely on suburbs than ever now that 55 percent of SNAP participants in major metro areas live in suburbs. Programs like SNAP, the Earned Income Tax Credit and Medicaid already deliver the majority of their benefits to suburban communities, many of which are squarely in the GOP column.

The ways in which the current system approaches initiatives such as neighborhood economic development, community health centers and affordable housing construction are often a poor fit for suburban areas where poverty is more spread out, public and nonprofit capacity is thin and hundreds of small municipalities routinely compete with one another rather than collaborate to address shared challenges like growing poverty.

 

Over the past few decades, poverty has become an increasingly structural feature of the American economy. In all likelihood, suburban poverty is here to stay. The battleground character of suburbs could set the stage for more ideological trench warfare and gridlock over federal anti-poverty policy and a suburban replay of the challenges that have beleaguered our inner cities over the last few decades. Or it could spur a bipartisan effort to convert top-down federal programs of old into support for new bottom-up solutions to urban and suburban poverty alike. The future of suburbs — as an American ideal and political keystone — may hang in the balance.