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CITYWIDE INITIATIVES AND POLICY CHANGE Preparing for Welfare Reform: The Spatial Pattern of Welfare Recipients, Jobs, and Services (Cleveland) Over the past two years, Case Western Reserve University's Center on Urban Poverty and Social Change (CUPSC) has conducted additional analyses that are beginning to have a profound impact on local policies. The work was done at the request of, and in collaboration with, the Cuyahoga County Departments of Entitlements and Employment Services, which were concerned about the possible local impacts of welfare reform. Because of their prior work with welfare data in their ongoing neighborhood information system, CUPSC analysts had advantages that enabled them to rapidly conduct a more thorough analysis of those files than had been undertaken before. They examined the characteristics of different cohorts of county AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) recipients based on the period of time since they began receiving benefits under the program. In so doing, the analysts were able to sort out those recipients who would be imminently vulnerable to losing benefits under welfare-reform time limits and, via address-matching capabilities, estimate and map the number of these vulnerable recipients living in each Cleveland-area census tract. In a separate study, CUPSC used ES202 data files to analyze spatial patterns of recent entry-level job openings in the Cleveland metropolitan area. These files, the basis for unemployment insurance determinations, contain records on employment in all parts of the nation, updated quarterly. Using their geographic information system (GIS) capabilities, CUPSC staff were able to examine past changes in employment in the metropolis at the zip code level and then to project and map the volume of new entry-level job openings to be expected in the next few years in each zip code area. They found that the residential locations of vulnerable AFDC recipients were tightly concentrated in space, mostly in a few inner-Cleveland neighborhoods—more concentrated spatially than even the overall AFDC population. In contrast, the entry-level employment opportunities likely to be relevant for these prospective job seekers were largely in metropolitan fringe areas. CUPSC estimated tract-level income losses likely to occur because of welfare reform (many of which were substantial) and calculated commute times that would be required for AFDC recipients to access various shares of new entry-level jobs. The latter analysis showed, for example, that accessing just 43 percent of the expected entry-level openings by public transportation from a location at the heart of the area where vulnerable AFDC recipients are concentrated would require a one-way commute time of 80 minutes. Their basic finding—that there were major disparities between where the poor live and where the jobs are—was not surprising to many policymakers in the area. But the contrasts were striking, and the fact that CUPSC had been able to actually quantify this "spatial mismatch" made a critical difference. The maps they produced (with associated hard numbers by neighborhood) showing these disparities cast powerfully memorable images. They captured the attention of the local media and then of policymakers. In response, the state of Ohio has since allocated $10 million for transportation assistance in Cleveland's welfare-to-work efforts, and local transportation planners are working with the CUPSC team to test alternative strategies for getting vulnerable recipients to jobs more rapidly. The analysis team has since begun assembling related neighborhood data (e.g., on the locations and capacities of day-care centers and job-linkage services and the pattern of rental housing affordability). Again, preliminary indications are that the production of solid data that can serve as a basis for sensible response strategies may well prove to be the critical step in motivating local actors to actually develop such strategies.  For additional information, e-mail NNIP at nnip@ui.urban.org. |