Neighborhood Jobs, Race and Skills

This book examines the role of job proximity on neighborhood employment rates and the propensity of residents to work close to their own neighborhoods. Employment rates in many older and particularly minority neighborhoods rose significantly from 1970 to 1990. The spatial concentration of unemployment and poverty precipitates a number of place-based policies, including residential dispersal, reverse commuting programs, and urban economic development. The author has developed a model to estimate the effects of jobs located within a neighborhood on the local unemployment rate, incorporating measures of skills match between nearby jobs and neighborhood residents, and controling for the number of competing workers in the surrounding area.
Job proximity, however, is not the only cause of urban unemployment problems. Other contributing factors examined include spatial mismatch, employment discrimination, skills mismatch, and the role of social networks. The study finds that although job proximity affects neighborhood unemployment rates, the effects are modest and the skill levels of such jobs are important. African Americans, after controlling for skills match, job proximity, and other factors, are found to suffer from higher unemployment and lower levels of employment at neighborhood jobs than whites and Hispanics.