Md.: Affluent Montgomery County has pockets of poverty, mostly in the east

[cpzilliacus]

[This is a story about inadequate highways and over-reliance on the promises of transit to substitute for those highways, though the story does not directly mention that.]

Washington Post:  Affluent Montgomery County has pockets of poverty, mostly in the east

Every Friday, four miles from Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett's Burtonsville home, they line up in the parking lot off Briggs Chaney Road to wait for the truck from the Manna food bank.

Mothers with young children, senior women leaning on walkers and solitary men looking older than their years come from the nearby garden apartments and townhouses for canned vegetables, boxes of pasta and whatever fresh produce is available.

The truck parks near Greencastle Elementary School, where nearly two-thirds of students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. A little ways south – near where county officials are planning a sparkling, science-focused town center – homeless men sit in bus shelters between stints of panhandling and drinking.

Pockets of need have long existed amid great wealth in Montgomery, where the $97,000 median household income is 12th-largest in the nation. But the pockets are getting wider and deeper, part of a suburbanization of poverty that demographers say is happening nationwide.

In 2000, none of the county's census tracts had more than an 18 percent poverty rate. Now, even as $3 million condos sprout in Bethesda, there are 12 tracts exceeding that benchmark, including the Briggs Chaney neighborhood east of Route 29, near the Prince George's County line.