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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

Right, the article should have been about it being expensive to be the urban poor. Suburban poor have it much better. They largely have cars, because people in a city pay more to park a car for three months than people in the suburbs pay to buy a car. They shop at and work Wal-Mart rather than 7-11, and Wal-Mart costs less and pays more. Etc.

The moral is, if you're poor, get the hell out of the city.

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I don't know about suburban as in "within commuting distance to the city", but rural poor largely have cars because they need them. You absolutely cannot get by in a rural area without a car, and that is a huge barrier to entry to the job market. Contrast this to living in the city (or close enough so that you can commute there), where you can commute whenever/wherever you want with a MetroPass for $70 a month .

The cost of living is much lower in rural areas, but the pay for an equivalent job is much lower as well.

If you're a poor person with an unskilled job, if you are in the city you can get another job the next day. In a rural area, this is close to impossible - jobs are very few and far between, so if you lose yours you might have to move to an entirely different location. (for an unskilled job, there are obviously more choices, but if you lose a skilled, professional job in a rural area and you don't have enough saved up to move somewhere else, you're pretty much fucked.)

So I dunno about the city vs. the suburbs, but if you are poor, you do not want to be anywhere near rural areas - they are absolute traps that leave you either on government assistance or at best in a situation with a single point of failure.

The urban poor usually have much better bus access and walking access to jobs. That saves a lot of money. The cost of housing is also super cheap. And many inner cities do have inexpensive super markets, cheap ethnic grocers, and dollar discount stores for household goods. I'd need to see some actual stats on the price of milk or eggs by neighborhood. I'm not sure inner cities are really that much more expensive.

The poor city I'm adjacent to, Trenton, has no supermarket. People simply have to shop at the convenience stores, which are more expensive anywhere. I'm not aware of anything you mentioned inside the city--just in the suburbs surrounding it. Housing is not super cheap: 800-1200 a month rent is typical for a far-from-glamorous home, maybe 700 if you're willing to live in the high-crime areas. Most people with kids would do anything to stay out of those parts. That doesn't leave a lot for food, utilities, child care, transportation, and misc. costs.

I'm not really sure what city you're considering. It's far from the reality I've seen.

What do you mean Trenton has no super markets? A quick google maps search shows over a dozen super markets and grocery stores. The rent you cite is less expensive than the suburbs. The cities I know best are Philly, DC, and New Haven. In each of these cities, the poor, inner city areas have lower housing prices than the surrounding suburbs, and they have available super markets.

Those small grocery stores aren't the same as a supermarket, and the supermarkets listed aren't really in Trenton. For some reason some of them are listed as such, but if you look at the map they're a bit off elsewhere. We don't consider that part of Trenton--one of those is in Hamilton, for example. Trenton's last supermarket closed back awhile ago and it's an obstruction to food access often-mentioned by non-profits in the area.

I'm not sure about rent. In states south from NJ those rents are high for suburban areas, for housing in much worse shape (chipping lead paint, etc). You're right in terms of staying within New Jersey--those are low in a state with very expensive housing (and everything else), but considering both health and the pay people get in the poor areas receive I'm not sure if it's a fair comparison. In my own experience, the suburban poor do seem to be better off than the urban poor (and I think it all trumps rural poverty)--and I love cities, so I really wish that weren't the case.

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