Detroit jobs few, far from residents - The Detroit News
Detroit has a host of well-documented problems — poverty, crime, street lights, mass transit — that hamper its recovery. “It’s absolutely critical that Detroit grow jobs,” said Teresa Lynch, nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a principal at Mass Economics, which is helping Detroit Future City work on economic development strategies. A Bridge magazine look at jobs within Detroit’s sprawling boundaries shows that perhaps no other large city in the country finds most of its jobs confined to such a tiny sliver of its land, with much of the rest a veritable jobs desert. Hundreds of thousands of city residents, many without access to a car, live in areas where there are fewer than 200 jobs for every 1,000 residents, in neighborhoods that are miles away from where most jobs can be found, both in and outside of the... “It’s a huge challenge for the city,” said Paul Hillegonds, chairman of the Regional Transit Authority, which was created by the state Legislature “to plan and coordinate” transportation services in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and Washtenaw counties. As Mayor Mike Duggan and other civic leaders work to take advantage of the city’s Midtown-downtown economic corridor, it’s also looking to bolster employment in the neighborhoods, where jobs are difficult to find. Detroit has one of the worst jobs per capita rates among big cities, due largely to the closing of large manufacturing plants that were once spread across the city. Source: www.detroitnews.com
