BACKGROUND

In the early 1990s, P/PV began to examine the increase in inner-city joblessness and the growing "suburbanization" of employment that had occurred in many major metropolitan areas of the United States over the past three decades. Our investigation showed that, in six of the nation's eight largest metropolitan regions, more than two-thirds of the jobs created during the 1980s were located in the suburbs; at the same time, inner-city poverty rates had become from two to five times higher than those in the suburbs of those regions.

The results of our examination highlight a problem seen often in the employment and training field: work-ready adults, including graduates of city-based job training programs, still face unemployment despite their training, partly because they have no access to the suburban job market where good entry-level jobs often abound. Further investigation identified three barriers to this access.

First, an administrative, or information, barrier keeps the inner-city job-seeker from employment in the suburbs. City-based job training programs typically have citywide rather than metropolitan-wide jurisdictions, which means they seldom place program participants into suburban jobs about which they have little information. Second, a physical or transportation, barrier limits access. Even if program graduates obtain suburban jobs, they may be unable to get "from here to there". They may not have reliable automobiles and, for the most part, public transit supports suburb-to-city commuters, not those going the other way. Finally, the relatively lengthy commute to the suburbs heightens the need for supports, like child care, without which suburban access may be limited, especially for low-income workers trying to make the transition to self-sufficiency and keep a job somewhat far from home.