Within Cities and Suburbs: Racial Residential Concentration and the Spatial Distribution of Employment Opportunities across Submetropolitan Areas

In this paper, we examine and compare the spatial distributions of jobs and people across submetropolitan areas using data on firms from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality and data on people from the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The results indicate that less-educated people and those on public assistance mostly reside in areas with high minority populations. Low-skill jobs are quite scarce in these areas, while the availability of such jobs relative to less-educated people in heavily white suburban areas is high. Large fractions of the low-skill jobs in these metropolitan areas are not accessible by public transit. Furthermore, there is significant variation within both central cities and suburbs in the ethnic composition of residents and in the availability of low-skill jobs. The ability of various minority groups to gain employment in each area depends heavily on the ethnic composition of the particular area.