The Poorest City: Deindustrialization and What It Left Behind

In September twenty eleven, the United States Census Bureau published a study that gave Reading the distinction no city wants: the highest poverty rate in the nation among cities with populations exceeding sixty-five thousand. Forty-one point three percent of Reading's residents were living below the poverty line. The figure drew national attention, front-page coverage in the New York Times, and a round of documentary scrutiny that the city had not asked for.

The story behind the number is a long one, and it begins with the same industrial base that made Reading prosperous for a century. The Philadelphia and Reading Railway had filed for bankruptcy in nineteen seventy-one, the end of a decades-long slide as coal shipments declined, highway competition intensified, and federal regulations constrained the railroad's ability to set competitive prices. In April nineteen seventy-six, the company's railroad operations were absorbed into Conrail. That same month, the Reading Brewing Company, which had operated for nearly ninety years, also closed.

The manufacturing economy that had sustained Reading through the first half of the twentieth century, the engine shops, the textile mills, the knitting factories, collapsed across the nineteen sixties and seventies as production moved to cheaper labor markets. The jobs went. The people who stayed were the ones with the least capacity to move. The tax base shrank. The schools suffered. The cycle that students of urban decline know by its bitter reputation settled into Reading with particular force.

Puerto Rican families, who began arriving in large numbers in the nineteen fifties and sixties to fill manufacturing jobs, became a majority of Reading's population as the city contracted. By twenty eleven, they made up more than half of the city's residents, inheriting an economy that had already lost its footing.

The poverty rate has fallen since its twenty eleven peak. The struggle is still ongoing.