Tim De Chant

Transit/job connection.

Editor of Kellogg Insight, the Kellogg School of Management's online magazine covering faculty research., May 20, 11.

Tagged with transportation, transit, planning, economics

If you ask any big city mayor what is one of the most pressing problems facing his or her city, I’m guessing poverty will be high on the list. 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. Did the rich flee or the poor converge? One study says transit provides the answer.

The article begins with pages of hypotheses, formulae, and tables, but the real history of the trend is buried at the end, just before the conclusion. The key to it all is the fact that public transportation is a distinctly modern invention, and before its advent, most people lived within walking distance of their jobs, regardless of income.

It is in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that we get a geographic glimpse, uninfluenced by modern public transit, at where the rich and poor lived. Proximity to employment dictated where people lived, and people, then as now, worked everywhere. Even the most successful hedge fund’s offices are cleaned by janitors who make little more than minimum wage, and this maxim held true back in the 18th and 19th centuries as well. The difference then was that the middle-class, the well-to-do, and even some of the wealthy walked to work. Only the fabulously wealthy had handsome cabs and carriages to take them about.

When mass transit started catching on, it was mostly enjoyed by those with money, like most new technologies. Affluent types began fleeing the city for “streetcar suburbs.” But as transit prices started dropping, a new technology burst onto the scene—the automobile. For the rich, cars were far better than cramped street cars. They could travel from home to work in relative privacy (though comfort was not a given due to the poor condition of most roads in those days). Plus, cars doubled as a status symbol.

Again, the poor were stuck in the city, and many remain stuck there today. The cost of owning and operating a car is simply beyond reach for a chunk of society. And given the limited reach or slow speed of many American mass transit systems, people without cars need to live closer to their jobs, which are typically in the city…

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Source: Per Square Mile, May 17, 2011

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