Poverty rate hits 17.5 percent in Nashville

Marilyn Musser cleaned house for a psychiatrist until a few weeks ago, when the psychiatrist lost her own job and couldn't afford Musser anymore.
So, Musser showed up Friday at St. Luke's Community House in Nashville, where emergency free food boxes are delivered to local residents. "There are no jobs," she said. "People get laid off and they can't find work, and the pay rates went down."

A study released last week by the nonprofit Brookings Institution says that while times are tough all over, Nashville has fared worse than the suburbs that surround it. The city of Nashville added about 32,110 people living below the poverty line between 2000 and 2008, a gain of 4.2 percentage points, reaching 17.5 percent of the city's population.

The suburbs as a group, which comprises 12 surrounding counties, saw an increase of 22,129 people living in poverty, a rise of less than one percentage point. Fewer than 1 in 10 people in the suburbs live below the poverty line, Brookings said.

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Those numbers contradict the general trend in the 94 largest metro areas in the country, which saw suburban poverty grow faster than urban poverty in the same time period, the study group said.

With the latest economic blows from the recession since the 2008 figures were tabulated, the Brookings Institution, a research organization that does work on poverty and urban-suburban demographics, now estimates that nearly 20 percent of Nashville lives below the federal poverty line.

That means income of less than $21,834 a year for a family of four.

Those who work on poverty issues cite a variety of reasons for the rising poverty in Nashville: A flight of the middle class to the suburbs for what they perceive as better schools, lackluster job growth and low educational levels all have plunged more of the city's residents into poverty during the last decade or so.

"The kinds of jobs that were sustaining the neighborhood in the past aren't there," said Christopher Sanders, the development director for St. Luke's Community House in West Nashville. "People are running out of options."

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