Sunday, May 24, 2015

From Vox: "How suburban sprawl hurts the poor"

Joseph Stromberg has this information about suburban sprawl. When you read this information think about all those western communities popping up in Palm Beach County. Eventually the jobs are going to follow, very far from the cities that have people with less means looking for jobs (many without their own motor vehicle):

     One of the basic problems here is called spatial mismatch: the fact that millions of low-income urban households are located far from the suburban places where jobs are often available. [emphasis added] Danielle Kurtzleben'sVox article on spatial mismatch is a great primer on the issue.
     Part of the root cause of this mismatch is historical. Starting in the 1950s, extensive highway systems were built through almost every major US city, linking them with budding suburbs. Along with other factors, this led many wealthy, white residents to flee cities, initially commuting in for work on the highways.
     Employers eventually followed them, bringing workplaces to the suburbs and leaving fewer jobs in the cities. Since at least the 1990s, the majority of suburbanites commute to the suburbs for work. "The dominant pattern today," says Alan Pisarski, a commuting researcher, "is suburb to suburb."
     As a result of this job sprawl, another recent Brookings report found, the number of jobs available within a typical commute distance for the average US metro area resident fell by 7 percent between 2000 and 2012. But it declined more than twice as much — by 14.3 percent — for people living in high-poverty urban areas.
     For the disproportionately low-income people left behind in the cities, this poses a huge problem. "We've ended up with a lot of people in cities who look at job listings and see openings in places they can't easily get to," Norton says.