For half a century, "moving on up" meant moving to the suburbs; that was the destination of the American dream, and millions of middle-class American families saw suburban living as their ticket to happiness as well as an escape from urban decay, poverty and crime. But suburbia may no longer represent the unmitigated good life it once did.

This week researchers at the Brookings Institution in Washington reported a surprising demographic shift: The suburbs are now home to the largest, fastest-growing population of poor people in the country. In the Baltimore metro region, for example, the number of suburban residents living below the federal poverty line - defined as $21,834 for a family of four - grew by almost 21,000 between 2000 and 2008. Meanwhile, the number of poor people in Baltimore City actually fell by 24,000 over the same period.

The Brookings report suggests that the traditional notion of poverty as primarily a big-city problem is no longer valid in an era in which 53.3 percent of the nation's poor now reside in the suburbs. As a result, policy makers are going to have to rethink how jurisdictions deal with a myriad of issues involving how government responds to the needs of the poor, from keeping the social safety net intact to planning for more affordable housing, public transportation and job creation.

Tackling all these problems will require a regional approach that takes into account the fact that poverty no longer stops at the city line. The recession has left Baltimore's suburban jurisdictions reeling from the effects of demographic change. In Baltimore County, where the percentage of poor people grew from 6.5 percent in 2000 to 8.2 percent in 2008, waiting rooms for social services have been jammed with people asking for help, and applications for food stamps are up 60 percent. Howard County, one of the nation's wealthiest jurisdictions, has seen similar increases in applications for food and fuel assistance.

Even so, the trends cited in the Brookings report may not be all bad. Though the total number of poor people in the Baltimore region remains unchanged, they are now less concentrated in a single jurisdiction. One would hope that the more they are integrated into mixed-income communities where opportunities for education and employment are likely to be better, the brighter their long-term prospects could turn out to be. Meanwhile, the decline in Baltimore City's poverty rate, one of the fastest of any city in the country, offers hope that the city's fortunes may finally be turning around.

But the increase in suburban poverty also presents difficult challenges. Suburban governments are not as accustomed to providing services for large numbers of poor residents, and the recent experiences of Baltimore and Howard counties show how easily the social safety net there can be overwhelmed. Moreover, because poor people in the suburbs are more geographically spread out, the logistics of making resources easily accessible to them are more complicated and require more planning. And as hard as it is for poor residents to get around by public transportation in Baltimore City, it's that much harder in the suburbs.

These are not problems that any one jurisdiction is likely to solve on its own. What's needed is a commitment to regional cooperation and burden-sharing that makes the most efficient collective use of the region's financially stretched public resources and institutions. We already have regional groups to coordinate transportation and development. Why not one to address the needs of the poor?

Readers respond

It takes a bit of independence to live in the burbs in the counties. If you need social services, the city is the best place to be because the infrastructure is already in place. The citizens of the counties already do more than their fair share to fund all of these services by living in a state with one of the highest tax burdens in the country. The money disproportionally goes to the urban centers - that's how we in the counties are already doing our part to help the poor.

TYGR6