The design of our cities is placing a new economic stress on our communities. With neither centralized residential nor employment locations, effective public transit planning is difficult and getting around is increasingly expensive. Those hit hardest are low-income individuals and their families who now compose a large percentage of new suburban America. The physical space between jobs and workers, coupled with insufficient and costly transportation, reduces the chances for low-income individuals to get a job. Social problems spurred from unemployment could probably be reduced if our workers could simply afford to get to work.

In the last 20 years we have seen a total overhaul of employment location and opportunity in American cities. Shadowing residential development, office and retail spaces have wandered away from the pack and splayed across the landscape. This fraying of the former downtown hem is now being dubbed the “Edgeless City”; vast networks of carelessly built residential, commercial and office space. With destinations no longer clustered together, creating clear transit ways between hubs is impossible.

The now heterogeneous demographic of suburban neighborhoods means people work in different places and do different jobs. In the past, job location clustered into hubs surrounded by homes, which produced a transit pattern resembling spokes on a bike wheel. The evolution of sprawl has caused the clusters to burst apart, dispersing them haphazardly across the landscape, and transit has thus become less predictable, less linear, and more of a maze.

Robert E. Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University  examined the decentralization of employment centers. In their report “Edgeless Cities: Examining the Elusive Metropolis” (Fanny Mae Foundation 2003), they observe how the United States has undertaken a massive reconfiguration of the employment landscape since the 1980s. They found a shocking parity between office space currently located in the downtown cores of major US metropolises (measuring about 38%) versus office space located in the suburbs of those same urban centers (measuring about 37%).  They say this fact is astonishing and believe that the full effects of this rearrangement are only beginning to emerge.

At a glance, the relocation of office space into the suburbs seems to move work closer to home. After all, if our homes are further from downtown it may make sense for our jobs to be, too. But in past years when jobs were located centrally people living in the neighborhoods circling the urban core lived relatively equidistant from the employment center. By decentralizing office clusters some offices will move closer to their workers, while others will move twice as far away. And when every individual is traveling to an unpredictable and changeable destination for work, designing transit systems to fit these needs is near impossible. Furthermore, this model is problematic because the ability to predict where one should live relative to employment becomes increasingly difficult.

The core concern given this new relationship between work and home locations then becomes connecting worker with employer. Getting to and from work is now a huge financial strain on everyone, and in particular on low-income individuals. Lack of efficient and economical public transport in suburban areas, and the subsequent reliance on the personal car for transport, is a major strain for people living on restricted budgets. According to The Surface Transportation Policy Project (www.transact.org) low-income households in the US currently spend between 27-34% of their income on transportation, with most of that money being allocated to a personal vehicle. This places transportation above food in annual expenditures, falling second only to housing.

Devoting such a high percentage of income to transport is unsustainable, but the problem is more deeply rooted and starts when searching for employment.  In “The Mechanisms of Spatial Mismatch” (2007), Laurent Gobillon, Harris Selod and Yves Zenou discuss the obstacles facing low-income individuals when looking for work in a decentralized environment. They discuss how job searchers are disconnected from the social networks vital to capitalizing on employment opportunities. Telecommunications can assist in this dilemma, however, they only expose the individual to jobs formally posted through these mediums, constituting a fraction of available work.

And even after potential jobs are identified, the cost of commuting must be taken into consideration for both the interview and the average workday. For higher-income individuals this is not a problem, but because such a high percent of their income is spent on transport, this expense has the potential to dissuade job searching among low-income individuals. The cost of getting to work can be so extreme that the individuals’ net income can be lower than if they collected social assistance.

The expense of finding and getting to work in a decentralized employment landscape can nullify the financial benefit of working. Due to our restructuring and the birth of the “Edgless City” jobs are now further apart, harder to find and more expensive to get to. Our employment maze has made a mouse and cheese situation for workers and jobs; the more barriers we place between our citizens and available work, the less likely they are to meet.