Lower-Income City Residents Need Affordable, Reliable Access to Good Jobs

Access to good jobs for people of all backgrounds has long been and will continue to be a critically important element of an equitable city, but it means different things as the key issues in urban transportation, housing, and employment shift. Whereas 15 or 20 years ago we were primarily concerned with the regional spatial mismatches that kept would-be workers in inner-city black and brown communities from living near or accessing suburban jobs they might otherwise hold, today the overarching challenge is the displacement of lower- and even middle-income people of color as housing costs and property values rise steeply in core cities.

When one approaches the West Oakland station of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system these days it can be hard to navigate the sidewalk given all the scooters lying around. Those scooters are emblems of the growing popularity of the station for the changing population of the surrounding community, as the oldest African American neighborhood of Oakland becomes increasingly gentrified with higher-income professionals, many with highly paid jobs in downtown San Francisco or Oakland, each city’s business district being only a few minutes away by train. West Oakland, whose central location to urban job centers was long touted, is having its boom moment, but for long-time residents this has meant a real estate-driven push out of their long-time home rather than a hand up the economic ladder. (These trends are documented in the Bay Area Equity Atlas and in photo essays and reporting based on the data in the Atlas, such as this piece.)

Lower-income former residents of Oakland, San Francisco, and cities like them around the country still very much need affordable, reliable access to good jobs. If they can’t afford to live near the areas where employment is growing far faster than housing, they will need far more advanced, comprehensive, and affordable mass transit or much higher wages to cover the cost of their extremely long automobile commutes. The scooters won’t matter much to them.

Victor Rubin is Senior Fellow at PolicyLink, where he leads, designs, and conducts knowledge-building activities. An urban planner with broad experience in community development, education, and social policy, he guides the PolicyLink analyses of issues in infrastructure, economic growth, healthy communities, youth development, and other areas.

Angela Glover Blackwell is Founder in Residence at PolicyLink and a Penn IUR Fellow. She started PolicyLink in 1999 with a mission of advancing racial and economic equity for all. Prior to founding the organization, Blackwell served as Senior Vice President at the Rockefeller Foundation, where she oversaw the foundation’s Domestic and Cultural programs.

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