Abstract
Rising poverty in suburbs has led to increased interest in how well suburban safety nets function. Apart from public assistance programs, community-based nonprofit health and human service organizations play a central role in suburban efforts to address racial and economic inequalities. Understanding how nonprofit services are distributed across the suburban and urban landscape, therefore, is critical to assessing how communities may be able to address need. In this paper, we examine the presence and volatility of nonprofit health and human service expenditures in suburban and urban counties across the United States from 2000 to 2017. We find the nonprofit safety net to be more responsive in urban centers than in suburban places, and less robust in suburban areas experiencing high rates of poverty or with a larger share of residents who are Black. Nonprofit health and human service spending also appears less countercyclical than is commonly understood. Suburban-urban disparities in nonprofit health and human service spending persist after controlling for several county-level demographic and socioeconomic factors.
- © 2023 Russell Sage Foundation. Allard, Scott W., and Elizabeth Pelletier. 2023. “Volatility and Change in Suburban Nonprofit Safety Nets.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 9(2): 134–60. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2023.9.2.06. The authors thank the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and Ford Foundation U.S. 2050 Initiative for providing research support of this project. Direct correspondence to: Scott W. Allard, at sallard{at}uw.edu, Daniel J. Evans Endowed Professor of Social Policy, Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington, Box 353055, Seattle, WA 98195-3055, United States; Elizabeth Pelletier, at epell{at}uw.edu, Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington, Box 353055, Seattle, WA 98195-3055, United States.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.