What Spatial Mismatch? The Proximity of Blacks to Employment in Boston and Houston

Abstract

We investigate the spatial mismatch hypothesis by analyzing detailed data on the spatial distributions of jobs and populations in Boston and Houston. Job potential measures calculated using data from the Urban Transportation Planning Package indicate that, on average, blacks are physically near more jobs than whites are. This finding holds despite analysis being restricted to consider only entry-level blue-collar jobs and allowances being made for group differences in search and commuting capabilities. This raises questions about the hypothesis that black-white employment differentials can be attributed to an inadequate supply of employment possibilities for African American workers resulting from shifts in the spatial distribution of jobs from the inner city to the suburbs. We investigate the spatial mismatch hypothesis by analyzing detailed data on the spatial distributions of jobs and populations in Boston and Houston. First advanced by Kain (1968), the spatial mismatch hypothesis argues that black access to employment has been adversely affected by the tendency for jobs in urban areas to shift toward locations distant from black residential centers. The idea is that because racial residential segregation has continued to disproportionately concentrate blacks in inner-city ghettos and because blacks have inferior access to automobiles, they'are less capable than whites of physically reaching suburban jobs and are thus more subject to unemployment. In the present article, we investigate spatial mismatch giving special attention to issues of conceptualization and measurement of mismatch. We draw on detailed data on the spatial location of employment taken from Urban