African-Americans less likely to relocate for a job in the suburbs
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If you live in a major city and you're offered a job that requires you to relocate to the suburbs, would you take it?
"If you are an African-American facing this situation you may not," says Stephen Ross, a professor of economics at the University of Connecticut.
African Americans living in major metropolitan areas are 30 percent less likely to take jobs that requires them to relocate, according to an article published by Ross in the Journal of Urban Economics.
"African-American residences are heavily concentrated in American central cities," he says, "and this result suggests that African-American workers may not be able to fully adjust as new jobs are created in the suburbs."
Only 3.5 percent of African-American residents in metropolitan areas both change jobs and move in the same year, says Ross.
"We should be seeing 5 percent," he says, after analyzing detailed information on African-American households in metropolitan areas collected by the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics. "A 1.5 percent difference may not seem like very much, but racial segregation which is at the root of the problem has persisted for decades. Over time, small annual differences can accumulate into big numbers."
The distribution of minority residences within metropolitan areas, says Ross, appears to shape the options of individual minority households. The fact that minority neighborhoods are more centralized may limit the ability of minorities to exploit all labor and housing market opportunities within a metropolitan area.
Minority households tend to be poorer and the poor tend to be concentrated in central cities, he says.
For those who do want to exploit those opportunities in the suburbs, housing discrimination and the lack of integrated neighborhoods play a role in making some African-Americans not take the chance, Ross says.
"As a result, members of the African-American community are going to have less information about job opportunities because their job networks are oriented around the central city where African-Americans live," he says. "If mobility is limited and minorities do not choose the best combination of job and residence available, this difference may directly affect wages, housing price and commuting distance."
Housing segregation, Ross says, could lead to labor market discrimination.
"If the suburbs are characterized by a lot of integrated neighborhoods in a very diverse community, then employers are probably willing to employ a diverse work force because there is a degree of racial harmony. If you have a very segregated housing market employers might take that as a signal that it is not necessarily wise to hire a minority to deal with whites in suburban neighborhoods for example."
Employment opportunities in central cities have been changing over time and that has put working class minorities at a disadvantage, he adds.
Ross says that in Baltimore 25 percent of jobs that do not require a high school diploma or college degree have moved into the suburbs. In Philadelphia, that rate is 20 percent, while in Boston and New York 14 and 12 percent of these jobs have moved away from the city.
If African-Americans are not looking outside the cities for jobs in the suburbs that require them to relocate, they will be faced with high rates of unemployment.
"If you are unemployed more often or you have long spells of unemployment then it is going to be more difficult to find a job in the future," he says.
One way to get African-Americans to consider taking a job in a suburb that would require them to relocate is by decreasing the level of racial segregation in our metropolitan areas, Ross says.
Programs such as Moving to Opportunities, established by the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, has been designed to break down economic and racial segregation by moving poor individuals into suburbs and helping them find jobs.
"It is a start," Ross says. "Active enforcement of fair housing laws and good low income housing opportunities in suburban areas would certainly help decrease racial and economic segregation."
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