Just as the inner city is being improved for pedestrians, cyclists, and those who use public transportation, the poor are being pushed out to places that are hostile to these cheaper forms of transportation. David Moser at City Tank breaks it down:

Though poverty poses dire and unjust challenges no matter where it exists, sprawling and auto-dependent land use patterns can exacerbate these difficulties. And this problem is gaining urgency, as more and more of America’s low-income individuals now live in suburbs (or are being pushed there), a phenomenon the Brookings Institute has called “the suburbanization of poverty”.

There are many reasons suburbs make the experience of poverty worse, but first among them is that automobiles are really expensive. Purchasing, maintaining, repairing, insuring, and fueling a car can easily consume 50% or more of a limited income. For someone struggling to work themselves out of poverty, these expenses can wreck havoc on even the most diligent efforts to maintain a monthly budget. With gas now approaching or exceeding $4.00/gallon, a full day’s work at minimum wage sometimes won’t pay for a single tank of gas. The burdens of sprawl weigh heaviest on the poor.

One of the major challenges for the urban environmentalist movement is to make green living affordable. The way things are heading at the moment, however, we can expect what happened to health foods to happen to our neighborhoods.