Appendix:

Occupational Matching

Application

Residents to Jobs

The accessibility of residents to jobs was compared with and without occupational matching. Findings include:

• The overall patterns are similar, with peripheral tracts averaging the lowest accessibility indices and centrally located tracts the highest. However, the job accessibility advantages of residential areas in San Francisco and the inner south bay (e.g., the Silicon Valley) were much more pronounced when occupational matching was accounted for.
  

• The highest match effect tended to be in well-to-do residential neighborhoods where median household incomes are well above the regional average.
  
• In contrast, the greatest job opportunity mismatches (e.g., high negative match effect scores) tended to be found in some of the region's poorest neighborhoods. All neighborhoods with the lowest scores averaged household incomes and employment rates well below the regional average in 1990. Most also are dominated by African-American or Latino households.
  
• A comparison of 1980 and 1990 data showed that while occupational matching generally improved among affluent neighborhoods during the 1980s, the opposite trend generally occurred among the poorest ones. That is, disparities in occupational matching widened substantially during the period of rapid employment decentralization in the 1980s.

The authors conclude that these match effect findings likely reflect several dynamics. First, there was probably more fluidity in housing markets and greater residential mobility among well-educated, higher-salary workers over the 1980s, enabling them to more easily sort themselves into locations reasonably close to job opportunities. Additionally, leading Bay Area firms also tended to locate with reference to potential pools of professional and executive employees during the 1980s. At the other end of the income spectrum, however, poor households anchored in often declining inner-city neighborhoods appear to have found themselves less and less accessible to jobs which they qualify for over the course of the 1980s.

[TOP]