Enterprise Community Partners and Housing Partnership Network are working together to launch a series of white papers Advancing Opportunity Through Affordable Housing. With contributions from the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California at Berkeley, the series focuses on accelerating promising ideas to address longstanding community development challenges in the current environment.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the seismic job losses suffered in its wake are taking a disproportionate toll on lower-wage households, women and people of color, making the Covid-19 recession the most unequal in modern history. The trajectory of this crisis threatens to exacerbate longstanding inequities that exist not only across racial and ethnic groups and by income, but also across a national patchwork of states, jurisdictions and neighborhoods already deeply marked by racial and economic segregation.

The growing prevalence of high-poverty neighborhoods over the past nearly two decades provides one manifestation of the uneven landscape that existed even before the current crisis began. Not only were there more high-poverty neighborhoods in 2018 than in 2000, they were in more kinds of places.

While many cities and rural areas continued to grapple with persistent high-poverty neighborhoods, newly poor neighborhoods emerged at the fastest pace in smaller metropolitan areas and suburban communities where they typically had not been before. Jobs and people of all races, ethnicities and incomes continued to move to the suburbs over this period, too, but not necessarily to the same swaths of suburbia. Rather than moving closer to opportunity, the net effect of these demographic and economic shifts was that jobs and people – and particularly people in poverty – got farther apart.

These shifts do not just reflect the preferences of people or employers moving in and out of neighborhoods and communities. Housing, land use policies, economic development and transportation policies as well as market practices shape these trends – each of which can and have been used in racist and economically exclusionary ways. As a result, the spatial mismatches between where many lower-wage people can afford to live and where they are able to find work exact a number of costs – for the worker (time and monetary commute costs), the economy (lost productivity) and the environment (greenhouse gas emissions).

For people living in high-poverty neighborhoods, a central question is: Where do they find work, and how can this slate of policy levers be used to better connect them with opportunities for economic mobility? For people commuting to economically better-off areas: What mobility strategies might be most effective to help them live closer to their jobs? For people who both live and work in areas of high-poverty: What kinds of investments and capacity building in place could create more pathways for economic mobility where they live?

President Joe Biden has made racial equity, economic recovery and climate change leading priorities for his administration. Housing is foundational to achieving these goals, in no small part because the way housing intersects with employment patterns and transportation options shapes who has access to opportunity and how far they must travel to reach it. Understanding the employment and commute patterns of people in high-poverty communities – and how housing options overlay those patterns – can help the new administration, state and local policymakers and practitioners effectively target solutions that support economic mobility.

This analysis uses a national tract-level database of Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics, American Community Survey and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data to assess commute patterns for people who live in high-poverty neighborhoods. After a brief review of methods and background, this analysis explores what kinds of communities those people commute to and how they are similar to or different from where they live. The brief concludes with a consideration of what the current pandemic may mean for these people and communities and discussion of the implications of and recommendations stemming from this analysis.

Read the Report