This article draws on data for Los Angeles to argue that effective transportation programs for welfare recipients must consider both the distinctive characteristics and patterns of employed women and the constraining burdens of children and other household responsibilities. The failure to do so will limit the effectiveness of these programs and greatly increase the likelihood that recipients will remain poor.
Numerous scholars assert that welfare recipients face a mismatch between their residential locations in inner-city or rural areas and employment opportunities located in the suburbs far from where they live. However, the authors' findings bring into question the wholesale application of the spatial mismatch hypothesis to all welfare recipients. Welfare recipients in mid-sized cities such as Fresno, California, do not face spatial barriers to employment as they live in compact areas where distances between residential and employment locations are relatively short. In contrast, job access is important in the nonurbanized areas of Fresno County where welfare recipients who live in job-rich neighborhoods are more likely to be employed than are recipients who are dispersed throughout more isolated, nonurbanized areas.
Data from the 1990 US Census are combined with three administrative data sets to examine the effect of geographic job access -- defined as the relative supply of low-wage jobs located within a three-mile radius of a census tract -- on welfare usage rates among the Los Angeles, CA, population with a high school degree or less. After controlling for other characteristics likely to affect welfare behavior, it is found that welfare usage declines as geographic job access increases. This relationship holds not only among African Americans, the subject of much of the scholarship on job access & economic opportunity, but also among whites, Asians, & Hispanics. 8 Tables, 1 Figure, 33 References. Adapted from the source document.
Researchers have posited that larger, denser metropolitan areas have important consumption advantages. We examine this using Cragg two-part hurdle and ordinary least square (OLS) regression models employing data from the American Time Use Survey. We test whether: 1) large metropolitan area residents participate in more out-of-home activities because these activities are more plentiful, richer, and/or easier to access, 2) large metropolitan areas have lower travel times because of higher densities, and 3) activities in larger metropolitan areas have more positive associations with subjective well-being than those in smaller places. We reject all three hypotheses. Metropolitan area population size is largely unrelated to time spent outside the home, excluding travel. Large-metropolitan-area residents participate in more arts and entertainment activities and eat and drink out more often, but they socialize, volunteer, and care for others outside the home less. Larger metropolitan areas are associated with dramatically more travel time. We find no evidence that large metropolitan area activities contribute any more or less to life satisfaction or affect than activities in smaller places. We also find that life satisfaction does not covary with metropolitan area size. In sum, living in a large metropolitan area may primarily involve a tradeoff of (travel) time for money (higher wages), with little net change in welfare.
In the last ten years transit use in Southern California has fallen significantly. This report investigates that falling transit use. We define Southern California as the six counties that participate in the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) – Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura and Imperial. We examine patterns of transit service and patronage over time and across the region, and consider an array of explanations for falling transit use: declining transit service levels, eroding transit service quality, rising fares, falling fuel prices, the growth of Lyft and Uber, the migration of frequent transit users to outlying neighborhoods with less transit service, and rising vehicle ownership. While all of these factors probably play some role, we conclude that the most significant factor is increased motor vehicle access, particularly among low-income households that have traditionally supplied the region with its most frequent and reliable transit users.
Implementing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 in Los Angeles is a difficult task in part because of the size and diversity of the problem. Los Angeles County -- the unit of government responsible for administering welfare programs -- is one of the largest counties in the country spreading across 4,083 square miles. The Los Angeles County is so large that it comprises its own metropolitan area. The County includes neighborhoods that are both highly urbanized as well as rural, areas of great affluence and areas of concentrated poverty, and neighborhoods that are racially and ethnically diverse.
A now substantial body of literature finds that land use and urban form have a statistically significant, albeit relatively modest, effect on travel behavior. Some scholars have suggested that various built-environment characteristics influence travel more in concert than when considered in isolation. Yet few previous studies have combined built-environment measures to create holistic descriptions of the overall character of neighborhoods, and fewer still have related these neighborhoods to residents' travel decisions. To address this gap in the literature, we develop a typology of seven distinct neighborhood types by applying factor analysis and then cluster analysis to a set of 20 variables describing built-environment characteristics for most census tracts in the United States. We then include these neighborhood types in a set of multivariate regression models to estimate the effect of neighborhood type on the travel behavior of neighborhood residents, controlling for an array of personal and household characteristics. We find relatively little variation in the number of daily trips among neighborhood types, but there is substantial neighborhood variation in both person miles of travel and mode choice. Travel by residents of one particular neighborhood type is notably distinguished from all others by a very low number of miles traveled, little solo driving, and high transit use. However, this neighborhood type is found almost exclusively in just a few very large metropolitan areas, and its replicability is uncertain.
