Ferguson protests highlight growing US suburban underclass

A week of violence and protests in a town outside St Louis are highlighting how poverty is growing most quickly on the outskirts of America's cities, as suburbs have become home to a majority of the nation's poor.

In Ferguson, Missouri, a community of 21,000 where the poverty rate has doubled since 2000, the dynamic has bred animosity over racial segregation and economic inequality. Protests over the police killing of an unarmed black teenager on August 9 have drawn international attention to the St Louis suburb's growing underclass.

Such challenges aren't unique to Ferguson, according to a report released in July by Brookings Institution, a Washington, DC think tank. The report found that the poor population is growing twice as fast in US suburbs as in city centres. From Miami to Denver, resurgent downtowns have blossomed even as their recession-weary outskirts struggle with soaring poverty.

"We've passed this tipping point and there are now more poor people in the suburbs than the cities," said Elizabeth Kneebone, author of the report and a fellow at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Programme in Washington. "In those communities, we see things like poorer health outcomes, failing schools and higher crime rates."

Ferguson, once a majority white community that's now about two-thirds black, highlights that dynamic. Coinciding with the decline in white population is a rapid rise in poverty since 2000, a period that includes the 18-month recession that ended in June 2009.

The St Louis metropolitan area ranked as one of the most segregated in the US in a 2011 study by Brown University in Rhode Island.