The growing distancebetween people and jobsin metropolitan America

This study takes a new approach to determine how many jobs people live near, or job proximity, throughout the United States. Proximity can influence a range of outcomes, from the fiscal health of a community to employment opportunities for residents. Differences across people and places in job proximity, and trends over time, illustrate how economic and demographic shifts in the 2000s reshaped the map of economic opportunity for different communities and populations. To carry out this analysis, the authors constructed a database that pulls together multiple sources of demographic and employment data for every census tract---small areas of about 4,000 people on average ---in the nation. With that information, the number of jobs proximate to each neighborhood (i.e., census tract) in the country is assessed, and how that proximity changed between 2000 and 2012, the most recent year for which there is data. Within the nation’s largest metro areas, particular attention is paid to how patterns and trends vary for different types of residents (e.g., by race and ethnicity and by poverty status) and communities (e.g., high-poverty or majority-minority neighborhoods).