NEIGHBORHOOD‐BASED NETWORKS,SOCIAL RESOURCES,AND LABOR MARKET PARTICIPATION IN TWO DUTCH NEIGHBORHOODS

ABSTRACT: Numerous neighborhood effect studies have reported on the negative consequences of living in disadvantaged neighborhoods for various employment outcomes, such as the duration of welfare dependence and level of income. One hypothesis for explaining this relationship is the social isolation hypothesis, which assumes that low‐income residents in disadvantaged neighborhoods are worse off than their counterparts in mixed neighborhoods because they rely on other disadvantaged neighbors to find work. These ideas are addressed by comparing survey data on social resources in the social networks of residents in a low‐income neighborhood and a socioeconomically mixed neighborhood in the Dutch city of The Hague. Findings show that living in a low‐income neighborhood influences labor market participation indirectly by limiting residents' access to job information. However, differences in access to job information cannot be explained by the high degree of neighborhood orientation in the social networks of residents in the low‐income neighborhood.     

Social capital and immigrants' labour market performance

This paper analyses the role of social capital on immigrants' labour market outcomes. We use principal component analysis (PCA) to build an index of social networks and explore its impact on the probability of getting a job and on wage levels using the Households Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) longitudinal survey data (2002–2010). We find a positive effect of social capital on migrants' employment outcomes and wages, especially for women. Distinguishing employment into blue and white‐collar jobs, we find that social capital only affects the probability of getting a white‐collar job. These results suggest that promoting opportunities to create social capital has a beneficial effect on migrants' integration in the host country.     

Job Accessibility of the Poor in Los Angeles

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Kain's Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis (SMH) suggests that disadvantaged groups who reside in inner-city neighborhoods have low access to regional jobs. We continue to debate this assertion because empirical studies over decades have conflicting results. This research examines whether the poor face spatial mismatch and how suburbanization has changed their job accessibility, in the Los Angeles region between 1990 and 2007–2011. I define spatial mismatch as occurring when the poor in the inner city have lower job accessibility than their suburban counterparts. I estimate job accessibility based on the spatial distribution of jobs and job seekers traveling via private automobiles. My results present a complicated picture: Inner-city poor job seekers have higher job accessibility than their suburban counterparts because many jobs remain in the inner city; thus, the inner-city poor do not face spatial mismatch. Moreover, suburbanization has evened out the differences in the job accessibility of the poor and non-poor. However, the advantage of living in the inner city for job access declines with rapid employment suburbanization.

Takeaway for practice: My research suggests that, since the poor do not face spatial mismatch, spatial policies commonly advocated to address their employment challenges—moving people to the suburbs, bringing jobs to the inner city, or providing mobility options—will not be effective. Giving people cars can help overcome both spatial and nonspatial barriers, but is not politically feasible. Planners should develop synergetic policies to complement spatial approaches including reducing labor and housing market discrimination, providing education and training, developing better job search skills, and creating supportive social connections.     

Labor Mobility and Structural Change in Pittsburgh

Since the 1950s, manufacturing employment in Pittsburgh has declined. Exceptionally sharp declines occurred in the early 1980s. Between 1977 and 1982 about 10 percent of the manufacturing workforce was displaced. Job losers' compensation went down by about 11 percent ($6,430) over the first three years following displacement. At the same time, employment expanded in service-producing industries and average compensation increased sufficiently to boost total payroll. The shift benefited women more than men, although men's earnings in some service jobs reached the levels of those in manufacturing. On balance, restructuring aided Pittsburgh's economy, but there were adjustment problems that merit attention. Because well-paid service jobs require much more education than displaced blue-collar workers possess, it makes sense to help dislocated workers find jobs similar to those they lost. It is possible to do so. About 16 percent of the job vacancies in Pittsburgh between 1977 and 1982 were in manufacturing.     

En-gendering Effective Planning: Spatial Mismatch,Low-Income Women,and Transportation Policy

Welfare-to-work transportation programs are predicated on a conceptualization of the spatial mismatch hypothesis that focuses on the central-city residential locations of welfare participants, rapidly expanding job opportunities in the suburbs, and the long commutes needed to connect them. Feminist scholarship and travel behavior research, however, show that the travel patterns of low-income single mothers are not consistent with this behavior, resulting in a policy mismatch between many welfare recipients and their transportation needs. The research reviewed in this article indicates that policymakers and planners should do more to address the transportation needs of these low-income women. Policies must account for the important role of gender in determining where welfare recipients will look for work, how they are likely to conduct their job searches, and the mode by which they travel to both employment and household-supporting destinations.     

Evaluating Local Job Creation

This article introduces economic development planners to a new approach to evaluating local job creation efforts, an approach that explicitly considers the chains of employment vacancies that open up when new jobs are created. This “job chains” model is an analytic framework for assessing the employment impacts associated with economic development programs and the social value of those impacts. The approach focuses on measuring the wage gains to job changers and placing realistic values on jobs for those not previously employed in the area. It explicitly considers both efficiency and distributional effects of job creation. We discuss the simple mechanics of the technique and present an example relating to the establishment of a large auto plant in a major Midwestern city. We conclude with practical ground rules for planners carrying out a job chains analysis of an economic development effort.     

Book Reviews

Problem, research strategy, and findings: We evaluate the role of transportation in improving the employment outcomes of participants in the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) for Fair Housing Voucher Program, a 10-year demonstration project designed to enable low-income families to improve their outcomes by moving out of high-poverty neighborhoods. We use longitudinal data from the MTO program to assess the role of transportation—automobiles and improved access to public transit—in moving to, and maintaining, employment. We use multi-nomial logistic regression to predict changes in employment status as a function of change in automobile availability and transit accessibility, controlling for other potential determinants of employment. We find that keeping or gaining access to an automobile is positively related to the likelihood of employment. Improved access to public transit is positively associated with maintaining employment, but not with job gains. Although we cannot say for certain whether car ownership preceded or followed employment, it is clear that having a car provides multiple benefits that facilitate getting and keeping a job.

Takeaway for practice: Policies to increase automobile access among low-income households—even in dense urban areas—will most clearly enhance job gain and job retention. While auto programs are unpopular with many planners, they would improve the lives of low-income families who currently have the least access to cars. In addition, supporting moves to transit-rich neighborhoods may help households maintain consistent employment.     

Housing location choices of the poor: does access to jobs matter?

Abstract

This research investigates whether access to jobs affects poor households’ residential location choices using data from individual households in the Chicago Metropolitan Area. Our results, based on discrete choice models, show that the effects of job accessibility on household location choices are contingent upon households’ automobile ownership and employment status. Places with higher job accessibility by public transit mode are more likely to attract poor households that do not own cars but have at least one employed worker or one labour force participant, while job accessibility by automobile travel mode has no positive effect on the location choices of poor households who own automobiles. The results stress the importance of job accessibility for those poor households with limited transportation mobility but strong needs for access to jobs.     

Urban Industrial Land Loss and Foreign Direct Investment-Related Manufacturing Job Sprawl: An Atlanta,Georgia MSA Case Study

Using longitudinal data from the National Establishment Time-Series dataset, this paper presents research on intra-metropolitan spatial patterns of manufacturing employment created by foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Atlanta, Georgia metropolitan area. A panel regression analysis reveals that the loss of urban industrial land in the central metro area is associated with the suburbanization of FDI manufacturing jobs over time. Based on the key findings of the analyses, the paper discusses the policy implications of job losses in urban manufacturing and some strategies for attracting and retaining these jobs.     

Time To Work: Job Search Strategies and Commute Time for Women on Welfare in San Francisco

The major policy approaches to welfare‐to‐work attempt to facilitate the transition into the workforce by providing job search assistance and transportation subsidies. Although these policies help some women on welfare, they fail to respond to the needs of most, who rely disproportionately on social contacts to find jobs, seek to minimize commutes, and lack the educational attainment that would help them penetrate the regional labor market. This article uses in‐depth interviews with 92 women on welfare in San Francisco, as well as a binomial logit model, to examine the relationship between job search strategies and employment characteristics. The findings suggest that low‐income women with children are more likely to rely on contacts than women without children, because they seek to work close to home. For most women, building connections to employers, improving human capital, and increasing the density of neighborhood economic and social activity will make jobs more accessible.     

Approaches to workforce housing in London and Chicago: from targeted sectors to income-based eligibility

In many cities, people with jobs essential to daily urban life—bus drivers, teachers, police, nurses and the like—cannot afford housing in proximity to their work. Municipal efforts to counter such job–housing imbalances include targeting such workers specifically or moderate-income households, more broadly, for housing support. This article investigates and assesses housing policy for modest-income workers in two cities, Chicago and London. Based on review of documents and key informant interviews, each city’s policy context, aims, means and outcomes are analyzed. Effective strategies include working with public, private and third-sector partners to find upstream cost-effective solutions, increasing shared equity/ownership products and developing mechanisms to ensure long-term affordability of workforce housing. While each city’s policies reflect local conditions, they also are indicative of broad trends in intermediate housing policy: an increase in stakeholders involved in programme administration and delivery, a continued focus on homeownership, rising income thresholds for eligibility and a shift away from targeting employment sectors.     

OFF TO MARKET: NEIGHBORHOOD AND INDIVIDUAL EMPLOYMENT BARRIERS FOR WOMEN IN 21ST CENTURY AMERICAN CITIES*

ABSTRACT: This paper endeavors to create a better understanding of the barriers to employment faced by disadvantaged urban women in the post–welfare reform era. Using data from the Project on Devolution and Urban Change, a unique geographically linked, longitudinal, multicity set of survey data, logistic regression models weighs the relative importance of individual barriers to employment (e.g., poor health, childcare, family responsibilities) and contextual or neighborhood barriers to employment (e.g., poverty rate, joblessness rate) on labor market outcomes. Results reveal that several neighborhood characteristics are predictive of employment outcomes, including automobile access, female‐headedness, vacancy, and disorder. Results suggest a more complex, nuanced interplay between neighborhood‐level variables and individually measured variables in preventing some women from obtaining both modestly paying employment with few allocated hours of work per week, and also better‐paying jobs with more hours of work per week.     

AN EVALUATION OF GEOGRAPHICALLY TARGETED ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS IN OHIO

Despite the continued popularity of spatially targeted industrial incentives with policymakers, a growing body of scholarship assessing outcomes associated with these policies has called their effectiveness into question. However, existing studies have treated different programs as comparable entities, when programs often differ markedly among each other in incentive generosity and requirements. This article uses panel data from 2000–2004 to examine county‐level employment and wage growth outcomes for Ohio's two primary economic development incentive programs. Results indicate that not only do different incentive programs lead to different, and at times positive, outcomes, but that these outcomes also differ for firms in different industries.     

Never Mind The Content,Let'S Understand The Process: An Alternative Perspective On Recent Federal Urban Initiatives

The Federal Government's urban and regional initiatives have attracted considerable attention. Authors from diverse perspectives have commented on the increased prominence of urban issues within the Federal sphere (Bunker and Minnery 1993), the number and size of these programs (Orchard 1993), the ability of these initiatives to achieve their goals (Paris 1992; Badcock 1993a) and the plethora of reports on urban and related issues (Alexander 1994). Much of this research implicitly compares the policy initiatives of the 1990s with those of the Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD) and all of it judges the Federal Government's initiatives against the author's perception of an appropriate outcome or outcomes. This paper argues that the objective or ‘rationalist’ approach to the Federal Government's activities in this policy milieu is in some respects mis-placed. While we must consider the consequences, it is folly to concentrate solely on outcomes and ignore the processes of policy formation and program development.     

Urban growth effects on rural population, export and service employment: evidence from eastern France

This paper examines how the spatial pattern of urban growth in functional economic regions influences the interplay of rural export employment, rural services employment, and population change in rural areas. Using an extension of the Boarnet’s model (Papers in Regional Science 73:135–153, 1994), we find that urban spread effects to rural areas in France are more likely than urban backwash effects, and that spatial urban (both dynamic and static) externalities affect rural population and employment growth. In the functional economic regions where the urban core is declining and the urban fringe is expanding, urban population growth involves an increase in rural export employment, and larger change in service employment favors rural population growth. However, urban export job growth reduces the growth in rural service jobs and expanding urban service jobs reduce rural export jobs, suggesting that expanding urban employment opportunities draws employees away from proximate rural communities. Conversely, where both urban core and fringe are growing, we observe an urban spread effect from the urban export sector to rural services—an export base multiplier effect with a spatial dimension—and from urban population growth to rural service employment.

The spatial structure of the labour market across public jobcentres. Does their accessibility matter?

The objective is to analyse how one's place of residence affects the probability of finding a job and to measure the definition of the public jobcentre catchment area, which contributes to improving labour outcomes in the most deprived areas. We propose a multilevel model to estimate the probability of finding a job controlling for individual characteristics and discerning the effect of the place of residence and the contribution of public employment centres. We use an administrative register of jobseekers (70,379) grouped by 384 postal codes and 24 jobcentres. The econometric results confirm the hypothesis that there is a strong residence effect that is not sufficiently mitigated by public employment services.     

GENDER IN THE EMERGING URBAN WORK FORCE

ABSTRACT: Industrial restructuring has had a substantial impact on gender differences in work outcomes within urban labor markets. Structural shifts weakened existing patterns of production and employment and redefined jobs, work relations, and market dependencies. The evidence reported here indicates that the emerging national norm will form as a composite of diverse regional market experience. This diversity is demonstrated in tracking the evolving structure of labor demand and of the options available to people seeking work in the nation's largest cities. It is here that women have claimed almost two-thirds of all new jobs created since 1970. In every sector but the services, women recorded superior intergender competitiveness. Growth in female employment, however, has encompassed disproportionate gains in the moderate and high skill market segments and a marked lag in gains at the entry level, particularly in the class of cities characterized by relatively high resident need and declining population.     

Spatial or socioeconomic inequality? Job accessibility changes for low- and high-education population in Beijing,China

Two forces can affect job accessibility: one is regional-level socioeconomic transformation that changes the total amount of job supply and job demand, and the other is intra-regional spatial transformation that affects the distribution of jobs and population. Transitional Chinese cities are experiencing accelerated changes in both forces, which may affect various population groups differently. Using Beijing, China, as a case study, the research tracks changes in job accessibility for the low- and high-education groups between 2000 and 2010 and examines to what extent the two forces affect the two education groups' accessibility changes. Results show that the socioeconomic transformation reduced job accessibility, particularly the for high-education population, while the spatial transformation stratified the city with diverging effects on job accessibility changes of the two education groups. Policies should consider both forces in promoting residents' socioeconomic well-being.     

城市低收入群体的就业可达性变化研究——以北京为例

职住平衡被新城市主义和精明增长的支持者所倡导,它不仅可以降低小汽车出行,促进城市就业,也关系到社会公平。本文选择北京作为案例,采取网络OD矩阵分析法,以平均通勤时间做测度指标,考察居住在可支付性住房中的低收入群体到商业就业中心的就业可达性。研究发现,采取公交方式付出的通勤时间大约为小汽车通勤方式的2倍,这反映了不同群体的就业可达性确实因交通方式的不同选择而存在差异。从时间变化上看,2004年之后比之前的可支付性住房,无论采取公交还是小汽车出行的平均通勤时间都更长,表明低收入群体在就业可达性上被置于更不利的境地,这将为中国城市未来的可支付性住房布局和交通规划提供借鉴,并进而对城市中弱势群体的居住、就业给予实实在在的关怀。