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

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.