This Is Disgusting

Christmas is past. You've cleaned up the wrapping paper and settled down to enjoy your new toys, but for millions of Americans its quite different and next year you could be one of them.

Doubled and tripled up in cramped studios. Scrunched into uninsulated garages disingenuously dubbed "family apartments." Sneaking a few hours of sleep between shifts cleaning hotel rooms and slinging fast food. The realities of poverty in America are far from our minds as we primp for our neighbors' New Year's party or watch our kids play with their new Nintendo Wiis. The sobering truth just doesn't carve a place in polite conversations over celebratory champagne.

But as a new report by the Brookings Institution shows, poverty is now increasingly a major problem on the brightly lit lanes of our nation's suburbs, not just in the urban areas. For the first time ever, there are now more people living in poverty in America's suburbs than in her cities - 1 million more - while, at the same time, the poverty rate nationwide has leveled off at 12.6 percent after increasing each year for a decade. That poverty bleeding was somewhat staunched throughout California, with the metro regions of Los Angeles, Riverside, Fresno, San Diego and Stockton among only a handful nationwide to boast an actual decrease in poverty rates since 1999. But the Bay Area went in the opposite direction.

Nearly 1 in 11 people in Bay Area suburbs are living in poverty - an increase of 15 percent since 1999. The poverty rate is still higher in the large cities (18.8 percent) than it is in the suburbs (9.4 percent) but the trend toward suburban poverty is accelerating. For families living in poverty, the financial struggles go far beyond whether they can afford the hot, new, gotta-have gadget for their kid this Christmas. They can't. Essentials - food, rent, clothes - are hard enough to afford. Throw in to the mix a balky, too-old car they need to get to work, and this Winter Wonderland is no such thing.

Did that catch your eye? The part about nearly 1 in 11 people in the Bay Area suburbs are living in poverty? That's the disgusting part.

Yeah, the streets are paved with gold.

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