Elizabeth Kneebone

Job accessibility

Senior Research Analyst, Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, May 31, 11.

Tagged with transportation, economy, transit, jobs, people

This recent Per Square Mile post caught my eye (hat tip to my colleague Ben Orr) because it hits on three key issues that affect access to opportunity in our major metro areas: where the poor live, where jobs are, and how transit fits into the picture. And all of these issues came to the fore in our recent study on transit and employment access.

In a tidy summary of work done by Ed Glaeser and his colleagues a few years back, Tim De Chant writes, “Cities across the United States are filled with pockets of hardship, and while rural poverty is widespread, too, impoverishment within metropolitan areas tends to be strikingly concentrated near downtown.”

Well … sort of. Yes, concentrated poverty tilts more toward central cities, but that doesn’t mean most poor people live in cities, or even in rural areas. In fact, over the last decade the pace of growth in the suburban poor population was so steep that the metropolitan poor population tipped from majority urban to majority suburban. By 2009 suburbs in the nation’s largest metro areas were home to 1.6 million more poor residents than their central cities and more than a third of the nation’s poor.

At the same time, jobs in almost every major metro area also decentralized. Almost 63 percent of metropolitan employment is in suburbs, and over two-thirds of low-skill jobs are located there. So that’s an upside for the suburban poor, right?

Not exactly. Poor people and jobs may be decentralizing, but low-income suburbanites are less likely to end up in living near jobs than their higher-income counterparts. How, then, do poor city residents reach an increasingly suburban jobs base, and how do poor suburban residents find their way to other suburbs to tap into growing job centers?

This is where transit comes in (or perhaps doesn’t, as the case may be)...

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Source: The New Republic, May 25, 2011

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