Many postindustrial cities across Europe and other contexts are marked by growing social–spatial inequalities, housing liberalization, and gentrification, which limit the housing options of low income households. We investigated changes in the residential moves of different low-income households (working poor, low to-middle income, and unemployed) in the Amsterdam and Rotterdam urban regions for the time period 2004–2013. We found an overarching trend for the suburbanization of poverty toward the urban peripheries and surrounding regions. While this trend appears to be relatively crisis resistant in the tight Amsterdam housing context, it is more cyclical in Rotterdam and has slowed following the global financial crisis. Low-to-middle income and unemployed households are increasingly moving to the urban regions surrounding cities, particularly to higher density satellite towns. Nevertheless, a growing number of working poor households remain highly urbanized, employing various coping strategies to acquire housing. This paper reveals how the suburbanization of poverty is both a direct process of poor households moving from city to suburb, and a broader indirect process caused by exclusionary mechanisms such as the decreasing accessibility and affordability of inner-urban neighborhoods, which reflect broader changes in the geography and socioeconomic patterning of urban regions.

Over the course of the past few decades, many cities have experienced profound changes regarding the class composition of the population. Overall, major postindustrial cities have become not only more middle class—“professionalized” (Butler, Hamnett, & Ramsden, 2008; Hamnett, 1994)—but also more divided along socioeconomic and class lines (“polarized”), as is reflected, for example, in rising levels of socioeconomic segregation in many European capital cities (Tammaru, Marcinczak, Van Ham, & Musterd, 2016). As cities’ class maps are redrawn, urban poverty also shifts; it may, for example, move away from the inner city milieu and “suburbanize” or “decentralize” (Cooke & Denton, 2015; Hedin, Clark, Lundholm, & Malmberg, 2012. In this paper, we investigate changes in the social–spatial layout of cities by focusing on one crucial element: the spatial dimensions of (urban) poverty. We examine the changes in Amsterdam and Rotterdam (the Netherlands) during the period 2004–2013. Rather than elaborating on more static existing poverty concentrations, we target the residential moves of low-income residents and the changes therein. We consider residential moves particularly important because this is where displacement, exclusion, and issues of housing accessibility or affordability become most apparent. Furthermore, what “happens” to urban poverty and where it goes are especially pertinent questions in the face of gentrification becoming the modus operandi in many (inner) cities.