Just before the Great Recession, I was finishing the initial manuscript for my first book, Out of Reach: Place, Poverty, and the New American Welfare State (Yale University Press, 2008), which was about the spatial mismatches between the location of poverty in cities and the social service organizations that provide help to the poor.

While writing, I visited a food pantry outside of Los Angeles that had reported large caseload increases in the previous years. Driving to the interview, I found myself entering a fairly exclusive suburban area. I wondered if I had the wrong address, but continued on and found the pantry’s executive director waiting for me near the front door. We talked about how caseloads had increased by at least 10 percent each month for the previous year. This was clearly a community in need. I found similar examples in other parts of the same suburban region. As an urban poverty researcher, I found myself puzzling over what to make of these findings.

Around this time, I began participating in conversations at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, where I am a nonresident senior fellow, about shifts in the geography of poverty within metro areas. A report by my colleagues Alan Berube and Elizabeth Kneebone at Brookings documented that the suburban poor outnumbered the urban poor for the first time in modern history. Although some of this increase was due to the sluggish economy of the early 2000s, it was clear that a major demographic change had occurred, with relatively little notice, right under our noses.

With Brookings’ support, I coauthored a report in 2010 titled “Strained Suburbs: The Social Service Challenges of Rising Suburban Poverty,” which drew on interviews with about 100 suburban nonprofits. The report highlighted numerous challenges for suburban safety nets, particularly the lack of program funding and the political obstacles to responding to rising poverty.

The book project expands on this 2010 Brookings report by developing a larger argument about the intersectionality of place, poverty and race in the US today. In addition to a deeper examination of poverty trends across cities and suburbs, Places in Need also provides a more thorough examination of how public assistance and social service programs have responded to the changing geography of poverty.