Overview
These maps present access to jobs by automobile in the ten regions in the United States in which two low-income housing experiments were conducted.
The first of these experiments was the Moving to Opportunity experiment, in which five public housing authorities (Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City) provided housing assistance for an experimental group of recipients with the stipulation that they use the assistance to obtain housing in low-poverty neighborhoods.
The second of these experiments is the Welfare to Work Voucher demonstration project, in which welfare recipients in six regions (Atlanta, Augusta, Fresno, Houston, Los Angeles, and Spokane) received housing assistance in addition to job training and other support in an effort to secure long-term employment. Our research team has calculated these measures of job accessibility in order to examine whether participants in these programs moved to neighborhoods that are more job-rich than the neighborhoods in which control groups lived.
Job Access within 30 minutes of driving
This measure is a summation of the number of jobs accessible from each census tract within a 30-minute drive time. Drive times were calculated using Google Maps, and the number of jobs in a place came from the 2000 Census Transportation Planning Package (part 3).
We calculated these separately for all jobs and for low-wage jobs (jobs paying under $25,000 annually in the year 2000).
We use data from the year 2000 as it is the closest match of available data to the periods in which the two HUD experiments were conducted.
Job Access Accounting for Competition
Additionally, we calculated a measure of jobs accessibility that accounts for the potential competition for jobs, following Shen (1997). In this, we calculate the number of workers who could commute to each jobsite within 30 minutes and normalize the accessibility of a given tract to the jobs in another tract by this number.
Data Sources
Google Maps. (2013) United States of America.
Shen Q, 1998, "Location characteristics of inner-city neighborhoods and employment accessibility of low-wage workers" Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 25(3) 345 – 365
United States Census Bureau. 2000. Census Transportation Planning Package (CTPP) 2000. Washington, DC: United States Census Bureau
For information or further questions, please contact UCLA's Institute of Transportation Studies at its@luskin.ucla.edu.