As a newly laid-off worker from Ford Motor Co., Jeanette Church counts herself as a casualty of the recession.

As a suburbanite, she's also part of a national trend: Unemployment is rising faster outside of major cities than within them, according to a Brookings Institution report prepared for release Thursday.

Church, a 44-year-old Shepherdsville resident, lost her job at Ford's Louisville Assembly Plant July 6, and her husband will lose his job at National Tobacco in western Louisville when chewing tobacco production ends there in December.

"We are going from being a two-income family to a zero-income family," Church said last week.

As the recession drags through a second year, the Brookings report found that poverty is weighing on suburban areas, particularly newer, far-flung settlements. Of the largest 100 U.S. metro areas, Louisville is among 75 where the burden is growing faster outside of cities, according to the nonprofit think-tank based in Washington, D.C., which analyzed the growth of the jobless rate, new unemployment claims and applications for federal food stamp assistance in cities versus suburbs over a one-year span.

Researchers considered Jefferson County the region's primary urban area. They compared its economic status with the surrounding Bullitt, Henry, Meade, Nelson, Oldham, Shelby and Trimble counties in Kentucky and Indiana's Clark, Floyd, Harrison and Washington counties.

In those suburban counties, the number of jobless rose 88 percent, from 14,492 people in May last year to 27,241 two months ago, said Elizabeth Kneebone, a co-author of the report entitled "The Crabgrass Recession. Suburbs Feeling More Pain than Past Downturn."

In contrast, Jefferson County's jobless rose 72 percent, to 37,193 from 21,580, in the same time period, she said.

The collapse of construction trade, real estate and service-economy jobs in this recession are the most likely contributors to jobless woes outside the cities, Kneebone said. Suburban areas tend to have higher concentrations of those jobs, she added.

The study findings underscore that employment trends affect entire regions, not just inner cities, she said. Policymakers, she added, can help by distributing services for the poor and jobless evenly throughout a region, rather than the traditional approach of concentrating social services in downtown areas.

"Poverty has changed," Kneebone said. "Poverty is no longer just an inner-city phenomenon or an ultra-rural phenomenon."

A conference last weekend at Spalding University bore witness to poverty's growing reach within the middle class, said Cheri Honkala, a key organizer of "Building The Unsettling Force: A National Conference To End Poverty."

"We saw more participants from the middle class," Honkala said during a University of Louisville reception that kicked off the conference last Thursday. A welfare activist for two decades, Honkala said she observed marked economic diversity among the 300 attendees at this year's conference. "I am seeing people (ask for help) from all walks of life."

From May 2008 to May 2009, Jefferson County's jobless rate rose 4.3 percentage points, to 10.3 percent from 6 percent, of those available to work, the report found. In surrounding counties, the rate of unemployed rose 4.7 percentage points, to 10 percent from 5.3 percent.

Applications for federal food stamp assistance, however, climbed at a higher rate in Jefferson County than in surrounding areas from January 2008 to January 2009, Kneebone said. Within Jefferson County, those receiving food stamps rose 10.6 percent, to 101,510 recipients from 91,755. In the surrounding counties, those on food stamp aid rose only 7.7 percent, to 49,109 from 45,591.

That may be because unemployed people outside the city have more resources, Kneebone said — they've not applied for food stamps because their income does not make them eligible. Then again, she added, suburban residents may not be aware of food stamp benefits, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

This year, a family of four must earn no more than $22,050 to become eligible for food stamps, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

"The concern for policymakers is whether people know about the safety net services," Kneebone said.

Social workers concentrate their efforts in cities or ultra-poor rural areas, said Cate Fosl, director of the University of Louisville's Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice and Research.

In the suburbs, "There is a gap, in terms of the people who are served," Fosl said Wednesday. "People in this state that are working on social justice issues are more commonly working in urban settings and extreme rural settings, especially Appalachian settings."

Reporter Jere Downs can be reached at (502) 582-4669.

// posted by Arun @ 7:22 AM