Forging the Dream

Studies that examine spatial character-istics of urban unemployment are oftenbased on some simplistic and problematicmeasures of employment accessibility. Thispaper presents a refined methodologicalframework for measuring accessibility,which enables the researcher to (1) improvethe measurement by accounting for job com-petition among workers commuting by dif-ferent modes and (2) understand the out-come more thoroughly by distinguishing theeffect of location from that of workers’ autoownership. This refined framework is ap-plied to a case study of employment accessi-bility of low-wage workers living in Boston’sinner-city neighborhoods, using primarily1990 Census demographic data and journey-to-work data. The empirical results showclearly that although the central location ofinner-city residence still gives the low-wageworkers some advantage, auto ownership isnonetheless the key determinant. Low-wageworkers living in inner-city neighborhoodson average do not have high employmentaccessibility because a large proportion ofthem do not own any motor vehicle and,hence, have limited spatial mobility. Impli-cations of the findings are discussed andqualified in light of the limitation of the re-search.