Congratulations to Fabian Terbeck (2020 Ph.D.) for being one of 3 finalists for the AAG’s J. Warren Nystrom Award (http://www.aag.org/nystrom) for his paper “The Suburbanization of Poverty and Minorities: Two Parallel or Interrelated Processes? (abstract below).  This is the top national award in American geography for dissertation research across all subfields of the discipline.

The final award will be decided based on a presentation at the 2021 AAG annual meeting.  The papers of the finalists are published in The Professional Geographer, one of the AAG’s flagship journals and where Fabian has already published one part of his dissertation.

 

The Suburbanization of Poverty and Minorities: Two Parallel or Interrelated Processes?

Fabian Terbeck

Previous research on suburban poverty has found evidence that the population growth of minorities in suburbs is associated with higher poverty rates. However, it has remained unclear whether the changing poverty rates result from a shifting population composition in suburbs, rising poverty rates among one or more groups, or a combination of these processes. Here I estimate the relative strength of these processes for Asian, Black, Hispanic, and White populations in the Chicago-Joliet-Naperville metropolitan area using data from the 2000 census and 2008-2012 American Community Survey. Results show that between 67 percent and 92 percent of the poverty increase in suburbs is attributable to poverty increases and population growth of minorities. Overall, Hispanic poverty had the greatest impact on rising suburban poverty rates. However, most of the poverty increase is linked to the greater exposure of minorities to the economic effects of the Great Recession rather than their population growth.

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