
Despite decades of effort to reduce segregation and increase mobility, Black people often live in neighborhoods with less access to jobs or transportation than their white counterparts.
This spatial mismatch, or disconnect between where people live and where jobs are located, creates disparity for Black workers, according to an article by researchers at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs published in the Journal of Urban Affairs.
The study found new evidence on the severity of spatial mismatch experienced by Black workers and low-wage workers in America’s metropolitan areas. Study authors were Yunlei Qi (PhD ‘20), assistant professor at Sun Yat-sen University in China, and Greg Lindsey, who recently retired as a professor with the Humphrey School.
Using data from the Center for Transportation Studies’s (CTS) Accessibility Observatory, researchers examined the persistence and severity of spatial mismatch in the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country for two important categories of workers: all Black workers and all low-wage workers. They compared the conditions experienced by Black workers to white workers and those experienced by low-wage workers to middle- and high-wage workers.
Housing location is a major factor
While many past studies on spatial mismatch use the measure of job accessibility, for this study, the researchers used an additional measure—the accessibility-based dissimilarity index (ADI)—to gain a more nuanced understanding of the problem.
“Job accessibility only reflects how transportation mobility influences spatial mismatch,” Lindsey says. “However, ADI helps assess how housing locations and distributions influence these disparities by comparing with the disparities shown by job accessibility.”
Since housing segregation is believed to be the major cause of spatial mismatch, the researchers believe ADI is more valid than job accessibility alone when measuring spatial mismatch.
According to results based on ADI, spatial mismatch disparities between Black and white workers are more severe than disparities between workers with different wage levels.
Additionally, jobs taken by Black workers are easier to access than jobs taken by white workers, indicating that the more severe spatial mismatch experienced by Black workers may stem primarily from where they live.
How transit affects spatial mismatch
Transit appears to affect spatial mismatch in several ways. While all the metro areas studied had similar disparities for auto-dependent Black workers, 43 percent did not show a severe disadvantage for Black transit commuters. Many of the metro areas with better transit access for Black workers had recently developed rapid transit systems.
“This suggests that new rapid transit lines may help reduce the spatial mismatch gaps between Black workers and others,” Qi says. “However, urban poor may not benefit as much as suburban commuters.”
The researchers also found that new rapid transit extensions are more likely to serve high-wage job locations than low-wage.
“Taken together, our findings show that legislative and policy efforts during the past few decades have not resolved the spatial mismatch problem for Black workers,” Lindsey says. “More effective policies to address structural racism and break patterns of historic housing segregation are still necessary.”
Spatial mismatch has been investigated by other U of M researchers as well. In 2016, Humphrey School Professor Yingling Fan published a study examining the mismatch between unemployed workers and job vacancies in the Twin Cities. Findings showed that spatial mismatch is a serious problem in the region that has worsened since the turn of the millennium.
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This story was originally published by the Center for Transportation Studies.