Spatial Mismatch is not Always a Central-city Problem: An Analysis of Commuting Behaviour in Cleveland, Ohio, and its Suburbs

Paul D. Gottlieb and Barry Lentnek
Additional contact information
Paul D. Gottlieb: Center for Regional Economic Issues, Case Western Reserve University, 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106-7208, USA, pdg2@po.cwru.edu
Barry Lentnek: Department of Geography, State University of New York, 105 Wilkeson Quad, SUNY-Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14261-0023, geobl@pop.buffalo.edu

Urban Studies, 2001, vol. 38, issue 7, 1161-1186

Abstract: One prediction of the spatial mismatch hypothesis is that black residents of the central city will have longer commutes than others. This prediction actually has two different components: African-Americans commute longer distances because they face discrimination in housing and/or labour markets; city-dwellers commute longer distances because entry-level jobs are scarce in the central city. This study uses a quasi-experimental design to distinguish between these two types of spatial mismatch. We compare 1990 commuting times for the residents of four Cleveland neighbourhoods: a poor black neighbourhood in Cleveland, a poor white neighbourhood in Cleveland, a lower-middle-class black suburb and a lower-middle-class white suburb. We were unable to find strong evidence that city residents suffered from poor job accessibility in 1990. We did find, however, that residents of the black suburb had longer commutes than residents of the white suburb—in spite of the fact that the black suburb was accessible to more skill-matched jobs. Probing further, we discovered that far more black than white suburbanites worked in the central city. This finding suggests that hiring discrimination or industry sector preferences on the part of black workers are potentially overlooked causes of racial differentials in commuting behaviour.

Date: 2001
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/00420980120051701 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:38:y:2001:i:7:p:1161-1186

DOI: 10.1080/00420980120051701

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().