EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The time limits and work requirements of the 1996 welfare reform law
present a great challenge to large U.S. metropolitan areas, where
hundreds of thousands of low-income people must find entry-level jobs.
The welfare-to-work effort underway in American cities uncovers a
phenomenon that many scholars already knew: there is a ?spatial
mismatch? between where workers live and where jobs are located, and
low-income workers often have no easy way to travel between home
and work.
Officials at the federal, state, and local levels already are
scrambling to solve spatial mismatch through transportation solutions, yet
they lack solid information about what spatial mismatch is, why it occurs,
and how best to remedy it through transportation. A review of empirical
literature and practical work shows that not all metropolitan areas
experience the same degree of spatial mismatch, and that policy
solutions may vary from city to city.
This discussion paper does three things. First, it proposes an index by
which we could assess the degree of spatial mismatch and categorize
metropolitan areas according to the severity of mismatch. Second, it
performs a preliminary categorization of five cities to illustrate the varying
degrees of mismatch found among metropolitan areas with large welfare
populations. Third, it makes both short and long term recommendations
for federal and state policies.
These policy prescriptions are informed by several observations:
- Low-income transportation programs are not simple to execute.
They may need to be integrated with other services and flexible in
order to adapt to the work schedules of entry-level workers.
- The choice between urban community empowerment and
suburban job access does not have to be an either-or proposition.
Giving central city workers mobility to travel to and from suburban
jobs increases family earnings and, in turn, increases the capital
flowing back into urban neighborhoods.
- Suburbs are not monolithic. They may vary widely in their degree of
transit accessibility and job quality. Job placement strategies need
to distinguish between outer- and inner-ring suburbs; they should not
be demand-driven, placing workers in jobs regardless of the
distance from the city or whether the quality of the wage outweighs
the opportunity cost of the commute.
- Transportation solutions should aim to enact incremental and
systemic changes that create transportation equity for low-income
people and improve long-term transportation systems for families of
all incomes ? not to create ?special? programs for the inner city
poor.
The short term policy recommendations argue strongly that new
federal grant programs, particularly the ?Access to Jobs? grants to be
awarded by the U.S. Department of Transportation, must be targeted,
coordinated, and sustainable in order to properly mitigate the effects of
spatial mismatch. Specifically:
- Federal grants for low-income transportation programs must be
targeted to those (often large) metropolitan areas which are
experiencing the most severe spatial mismatch.
- These grants should reward applicants whose efforts maximize the
resources of the existing metropolitan transportation system, utilize a
variety of transportation modes reflecting the transportation and
labor market patterns of the metropolitan area at large (e.g., public
transit, private transit, vanpools, and cars), and prioritize job
placement according to transportation accessibility and job quality.
- Federal leaders must lead by example and make low-income
transportation programs an integrated part of federal urban
transportation policy, taking steps to enforce more seamless
coordination among federally-funded transit and transportation
agencies within a metropolitan area.
- Federal agencies should incorporate more rigorous evaluation
measures into new low-income transportation grants, and they
should improve federal information infrastructure to make placebased
statistical data more accessible to local program
implementers.