Yep.
Wal Mart has oversaturated the suburban/rural market and their competition has followed so now they need to go into cities to continue growing.
And the Walmarts of the world are taking advantage of this phenomenon:
source:
Lancaster Online
Poverty growing faster in county's suburbs than the city
Sharp increase here in number of people outside city getting free school lunches, food stamps
Shortly before 9 a.m. on a sweltering Wednesday, yellow-shirted volunteers at the Hempfield Area Food Pantry scurry about, preparing for the deluge.
Tables are laden with cakes and breads, shelves stocked with canned foods, cereal and fresh vegetables. Huge bags of rice dominate a corner of one room in the bottom floor of Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church in Landisville, where the food pantry distributes food Mondays and Wednesdays.
There's plenty of food to feed the suburban masses. But the masses are growing.
"We just had 21 new client families sign up last month," said president Dave Bleil. The pantry now serves well over 300 families, an all-time high. Some clients are elderly, some are immigrants who speak little English and some are on disability.
INTERACTIVE MAP: Poverty in the Suburbs
Some, such as Kimberly Drace, seem like typical suburban moms.
"We've been coming here for about three years," said Drace, as she bounced 1-year-old daughter, Brooklyn, on her lap and 4-year-old son, Dakota, played at her feet. She and her husband have six kids to feed — three of their own, three from his previous marriage.
Her husband works full time, "but we can't get food stamps; he makes too much money," Drace said. "I don't know what we'd do without this."
In the wake of the Great Recession, food pantries, clothing banks and similar operations have seen demand for aid soar. But here and around the country, demand has grown the most where it's expected least: the suburbs.
"There's always been poverty in the Hempfield area," said food pantry vice president Diane Gerlach. "But nothing like it is now."
In a major study unveiled last month, the Brookings Institute reported that, for the first time, the number of poor people living in suburban areas increased 67 percent between 2000 and 2011 — more than twice the growth rate in cities.
To be sure, both nationwide and in Lancaster County, poverty remains concentrated in urban areas. In the School District of Lancaster, for example, nearly 81 percent of students qualify for a free or reduced-price school lunch, up from 72 percent in in 2005 and by far the highest number in the county.
But in the Manheim Township and Warwick school districts, the percentage of eligible pupils has more than doubled over the same period. In East Hempfield Township, the number of people receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits — commonly called food stamps — nearly tripled between 2008 and 2013.
The trend is worrying, experts say, because the infrastructure created to wage war on poverty remains concentrated in urban areas even as poverty has moved out to the suburbs. Despite longer lines at the Hempfield Area Food Pantry and similar operations, the suburban poor remain largely hidden and, as a result, underserved.
"What the suburbanization of poverty means is that [the poor] are now dispersed, less visible, less able to organize, and thus without much of a voice," said Dr. Antonio Callari, chairman of the economics department and director of the Local Economy Center at Franklin & Marshall College.
"Large numbers of the poor will remain poor. But they will suffer their poverty in anonymity."
A poorer place
Defining "the suburbs" in Lancaster County is tricky. Few might describe places such as West Lampeter or East Cocalico townships as "suburban" — though both have seen a significant amount of suburban development.
And while Lancaster County remains largely rural, new suburban development also have turned portions of the county into "bedroom communities" for Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Baltimore.
But as a whole, Lancaster County is a poorer place than it was.
The 2000 Census counted 35,547 people in Lancaster County living below the poverty line, 7.8 percent of the local population. By 2011, the Census Bureau's American Community Survey estimated that the number of local people living below the poverty line had risen to 49,400 — 9.9 percent.
The ACS uses estimates, and the numbers aren't definitive. But other statistics show that need overall is up — and increasing faster outside the county's urban cores.
Countywide, the number of residents enrolled in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) — food stamps — rose from 29,766 in April 2008 to 55,991 in April 2013, according to data from the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare.
In the City of Lancaster, the number of food stamp recipients rose from 15,211 in 2007 to 23,341 this year — a 53 percent increase. But Mount Joy Township saw a 222 percent increase. East Hempfield Township saw a 152 percent increase; West Lampeter 150 percent; Manheim Township 135 percent.
Some rural municipalities fared even worse. Bart Township saw a tenfold increase — from 12 people receiving benefits in 2007 to 120 this year. East Drumore Township saw the number of SNAP recipients rise from 40 to 172, a 330 percent rise; West Cocalico Township saw a 361 percent increase, from 71 to 327 over the same spell.
Or consider the number of schoolchildren here eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches. In October 2005, 19,216 students at area districts qualified; by October 2012, that number had risen to 27,466.
As has long been the case, the School District of Lancaster had the most eligible pupils.
The 8,563 students eligible in 2005 (72.3 percent of the student body) had grown to 9,043 in 2012 (80.8 percent of the student body). That's an increase of 480 kids.
But in Manheim Township, the number of eligible students rose from 588 to 1,517 — 929 kids. And eligible students as a percentage of the overall student body more than doubled, from 11.2 percent to 26.2 percent.
Conestoga Valley, Ephrata, Hempfield, Penn Manor and Solanco also saw greater increases in the number of eligible pupils than city schools did.
Suburban and rural districts also are seeing a surge in homeless students. In 2011, according to story in the Sunday News, the School District of Lancaster had by far the most homeless students, with more than 1,000. But Hempfield outpaced all the other suburban and rural school districts with 297 — a figure that continues to grow, according to district superintendent Dr. Brenda Becker.
That number increased to 324 for the 2012-13 school year.
"Where you have communities that are more 'walkable,' where it's easier for people to depend on public transportation, that tends to attract more folks in a transient situation," Becker said. "Where you see more rental properties, if they are not on the high end, you will see more transience."
Recession hits
What's going on? The Great Recession is an obvious answer.
"We knew there was poverty in this community," said the Rev. Matthew Lenahan, pastor of Zion Lutheran Church in Akron, where the Peter's Porch program serves a free hot breakfast the third Saturday of every month and distributes food, clothing and household items.
"We were connected to Akron Elementary school, where one in three students get a reduced-price or free lunch; it wasn't like we woke up one day and it was here."
But when the recession hit, "It was unbelievable — we went from 60 people coming [to Peter's Porch] to a couple hundred showing up, all within a few months. It just exploded."
Dr. Gene Freeman, superintendent of the Manheim Township School District, thinks the economy is to blame.
"More parents/guardians are without jobs or [are experiencing] decreased employment, which directly relates to the increased needs of our student body," Freeman said in an e-mail.
The authors of the Brookings study, Elizabeth Kneebone and Michael Berube, write that the recession hit some economic sectors, such as construction, particularly hard.
In the Cocalico School District, superintendent Dr. Bruce Sensenig says the building industry's woes have been a factor in the increase in Cocalico students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.
"We do have a heavy concentration of builders, electricians, plumbers and trades," said Sensenig. "When that industry declined, we did have more unemployed."
Brookings also cites an increase in affordable housing in the suburbs, writing that by the end of 2010, "roughly half of residents in voucher households lived in suburbs."
Said F&M's Callari: "The assumption has been that if the poor are located in more affluent neighborhoods, they will be better served: more resources would be available to help them, and poorer kids would grow up with more role-model adults around them and have better chances of escaping poverty. But, of course, this is a huge assumption to make."
Hunger and poverty
Whatever the reason, schools, social service agencies, faith-based groups and others who work to alleviate hunger and poverty are seeing a significant uptick in clients, many of whom are seeking help for the first time in their lives.
"A lot of people who come to us have never utilized any kind of public service before," said Lenahan, of Akron's Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church. "They're new to this kind of need, but they'll say, 'Here are our circumstances: Job loss, unemployment, high medical bills and rising costs, most of it resulting from un- and underemployment."
Bob Thomas is President of Tabor Community Services, which like many of the organizations that help the poor in Lancaster County is located in the city. Traditionally, Thomas said, a slight majority of the clients using Tabor's services — credit counseling, mortgage and foreclosure counseling, housing for the homeless and rental counseling — have been from the city. But in recent years, he said, the number of clients from outside the city has crept steadily upward.
"Our consumer-credit counselors say that compared to the lower-income people from the city, people from the county are more likely to be carrying debt — and generally, they're more resistant to giving things up."
That, Thomas said, "suggests you're dealing with people who are accustomed to a higher standard of living, but who have then lost income... They can be reluctant to seek this kind of assistance, because it means admitting to themselves that they're really in trouble."
Joan Espenshade founded the "Power Packs" program in 2005, designed to provide food and nutritional information to families in one School District of Lancaster elementary school who were experiencing "food insecurity" on weekends, when school lunch programs are unavailable.
"We started in the School District of Lancaster because it was the most acute need," Espenshade said. But soon, she was getting requests from other school districts; now the projects serves 24 schools in five school districts, including Manheim Township, Warwick and Penn Manor.
"We've noticed a shift in our demographics," Espenshade said. "There are families who were previously two-income families and could easily stop at Ruby Tuesday's and pick up an easy dinner to go. Now they've been downsized and they're struggling with mortgage payments and maybe part-time work; and unfortunately, because they were so comfortably middle class, they have no skills to live in poverty."
But they learn, because they must.
At the Hempfield Area Food Bank, Stacey — who asked that her last name not be used — picked out supplies for herself and her 15-year-old son.
"This is actually my first time here," said Stacey, of East Petersburg, who had no idea the food pantry existed until last month.
She's on food stamps; she's been unable to find a job; the food pantry helps her and her son gets by. But she dreams of a day when things are different, when she doesn't need the help — and can give back in response to what she's received.
"One day, I'd like to be on the other side of this," she said. "Not as the person getting food from the pantry — but as the one donating."
