The last decade was a bad one for poverty in America, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution.  After the economic growth of the 1990s brought "near record lows in the poverty rate and considerable declines in the number of high-poverty neighborhoods", the early 2000s saw those numbers shoot back up.  And there is some data that shows that suburbs led that growth.  Brookings researchers Elizabeth Kneebone and Emily Garr write:

In 2000, the greatest share of the poor lived in the primary cities of the country’s largest metro areas. These cities were home to almost 400,000 more poor than their suburbs, and the balance of the poor population was more likely to live in non-metropolitan communities than small metro areas. However, growth rates well above average in the suburban and small metro area poor populations have re-drawn the map over the course of the decade.

Most notably, by 2008 a plurality of the nation’s poor lived in large metropolitan suburbs. Between 2000 and 2008, the number of these suburban poor increased by 25 percent—10 points above the national average and close to 5 times the growth rate for the poor in primary cities. Overall, suburbs gained more than 2.5 million poor individuals, accounting for almost half of the total increase in the nation’s poor population since 2000. Smaller metro areas saw their poor population increase almost 20 percent, a gain of 1.3 million poor over the eight-year period. At the same time, non-metro area and primary city poor populations also grew, but at much slower paces of 12.1 and 5.6 percent—or 842,000 and 582,000 people—respectively. As a result, by 2008 suburbs had overtaken primary cities as home to the largest share of the nation’s poor (almost one-third), and small metro areas housed more poor people than non-metro areas.

Here's a look at the increase in the poverty rate in suburbs compared to other types of communities:

And here's a look at the growth in the poverty rate for suburbs in the four major regions of the country:

Read The Suburbanization of Poverty here.