Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In the past two decades, the geography of poverty in the United States has been redrawn in significant ways. More poor residents now live in suburbs than in big cities or in rural areas. The progress against concentrated poverty made in the 1990s was erased in the wake of two economic downturns, but as the number of distressed neighborhoods climbed in the 2000s, they emerged at the fastest pace outside of the urban core—in suburbs and smaller metro areas that often lack the infrastructure and support systems to address the needs of poor residents. At the same time, employment opportunities, especially for lower- and moderate-wage workers, continued to shift away from downtowns. Even the resurgence of urban employment centers after the Great Recession has done little to curb the outward growth of jobs in most major metro areas. The outward spread of both poverty and employment in metropolitan America has often put low-income workers at a greater distance from job opportunities that could offer a path out of poverty, particularly if they live in high-poverty neighborhoods, in part because the distribution of affordable housing in the suburbs often does not align with the jobs-rich areas that have produced the greatest employment gains. This analysis uses Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics and American Community Survey data to analyze how the shifting geography of poverty, employment, and affordable housing has shaped access to employment and commute patterns for low-income workers in the nation’s major metro areas, and the implications of these shifts for economic development, transportation, housing, and safety net policies.

Specifically, this analysis uses LEHD origin-destination data to measure commute distances for workers, with a particular focus on workers in jobs that pay less than $15,000 a year (or roughly the equivalent of a full-time, full-year worker earning the federal minimum wage), and parses commute patterns based on the type of community they live in (e.g., city, suburb). It also uses ACS data to assess neighborhood conditions (e.g., poverty levels) for origin and destination neighborhoods. One finding to emerge from this analysis is that, on the whole, lower-wage workers tend to commute to jobs in relatively better-off neighborhoods than the ones they live in, particularly if the jobs are located in the suburbs. That pattern appears to persist even for low-wage workers already living in the suburbs, suggesting that lower-income suburban residents often live in areas that are relatively poorer and less jobs-rich than the suburbs they commute into for work. Overlaying commute patterns and neighborhood characteristics with ACS data on neighborhood housing stock (e.g., the availability of rental housing, the relative price of rents) also allows this analysis to explore the extent to which housing and land use patterns shape the employment access and commute patterns evident in the LEHD data.