'Job sprawl' keeps Blacks isolated from opportunities

• Originally published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer Reporter on Wednesday, February 16, 2005 [here]

By: Becky Gaylord

 Blacks in Cleveland are more isolated from employment opportunities than blacks in all but five other U.S. cities, a new study has found.

 Cleveland ranks high in "job sprawl" - the distance outside the city center that people seeking employment must travel. But job sprawl disproportionately affects minorities: When sprawl is bad, there's a greater mismatch between where blacks live and where the jobs are, research from the Brookings Institution found.

 "Blacks are more geographically isolated from jobs in high job-sprawl areas, regardless of region, metropolitan area size and their share of the metropolitan population," worsening economic segregation, the report found.

 Nationally, Detroit ranked highest in blacks' isolation from jobs, the Washington, D.C.-based policy and research institution found. Southern and Western cities, led by Greenville, S.C., were among the lowest.

 In the last decade, more blacks have moved into Cleveland's suburbs. Employment opportunities, however, have edged even farther away.

 "The farther you are from work," said the report's author, Michael Stoll, "the more time and money it takes to get information about jobs, the more time it takes to commute to and search for those jobs."

 Affordable housing, ample in Cleveland but far less so in many suburbs, and access to transportation are part of the problem, according to researchers.

 "People who can afford to, locate where the jobs are," said Claudia Coulton, a professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University.

 She is co-director of the school's Center on Urban Poverty and Social Change.

 For several years, the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority has arranged vans to take scores of low-income workers to jobs in the suburbs.

 RTA officials work with the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission and meet with suburban companies to time the trips so workers arrive just before shifts start and have a way back to the city after shifts end.

 The vans took enough passengers on some loops that RTA created bus routes for commuters.

 Rhonda McCord of Cleveland boarded the 12:50 p.m. bus Monday at Public Square, headed to her job at Northern Stamping in Valley View on Hub Parkway. McCord said she has been taking vans or special buses from downtown since starting her job there 2½ years ago.

 Northern Stamping is a unionized company, and pay starts at $9 an hour or more. But from Cleveland, as Joel Freilich, RTA manager of service planning says, "there's no other way to get there besides a car."

 RTA set up two other routes to ferry passengers to hotel and restaurant jobs in Beachwood and mostly industrial jobs in Solon.