Suburbs struggling just to figure out how many need aid

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Updated: March 28, 2012 12:01AM

The new U.S. Census numbers aggressively challenge our long-held beliefs about what America looks like and where it lives.

Last week, the big shockers were the rate of black flight from Detroit — the city lost 25 percent of its population, much of it to surrounding suburbs — and the climbing numbers of Asians driving the growth of California and New York, also much of it suburban.

The Latino population passed a new milestone, topping 50 million and representing more than half of the nation’s population increase. In Illinois, Latinos are now 15.8 percent of the state’s population and accounted for 90 percent of the growth in the last decade.

Where? In the suburbs.

Illinois is home to the fastest-growing county in the nation, Kendall, which includes parts of Aurora, Joliet, Oswego, Plainfield and Plano.

There’s no denying the national trend: More minorities are moving out to the suburbs of big cities and more immigrants are settling there as well, bypassing the city altogether.

But the suburbs weren’t prepared for the infusion, and many are having a hard time dealing with an increased demand for social services.

According to Ben Roth, co-author with Scott W. Allard of a recent Brookings Institution report titled “Strained Suburbs: The Social Service Challenges of Rising Suburban Poverty,” the suburbs already were seeing a growth in poverty in 2007, before the Great Recession began, and the social safety net has been seriously strained.

At a recent Latino Policy Forum briefing, Roth painted a picture of suburban communities trying to cope with newcomers whose incomes are lower than average at the same time that many established residents are, as a result of the economic downturn, experiencing their first brushes with food insecurity, housing insecurity and other ills.

As people reach out for help, they’re finding that nonprofit service organizations are stretched to the limit and can’t provide the assistance they once could. The agencies have to get by with less state money.

But it all depends on where you live.

Roth and Allard found that communities varied wildly in the kind of assistance they offered. For instance, no nonprofit agency in Naperville — the suburb Roth and Allard surveyed that had the fewest people living in poverty and the greatest number of organizations to serve their needs — offered food assistance or employment services.

Carpentersville, on the other hand — with one organization serving 3,487 people in poverty — offered food assistance but nothing else. Aurora, another community with only one social service organization for its 5,164 residents living in poverty, offered employment services, but nothing else.

If this seems impossible, you’re not alone in thinking so. The data should be taken seriously, but with a grain of salt.

“There were several instances in which I interviewed leaders of social service organizations in communities and they said that they were the only organization in the immediate area that offered certain services,” Roth told us at a briefing. “Those were not completely accurate observations, but it speaks to something important: Stakeholders such as town leaders, funders and even nonprofit service providers don’t have an accurate picture of what their safety net looks like.”

There is no question that more money and resources must be funneled toward suburban social service organizations, which would strengthen the entire metropolitan Chicago region. But the first low-cost step is to figure out a little better just where the weak — and strong — spots are.