Job-Seeking Detroiters Cannot Get to Where the Jobs Are
By ROBYN MEREDITH

DETROIT -- At about 3 on weekday afternoons, Dorothy Johnson heads to her job in the suburbs cleaning office buildings. Two buses and two hours later, she reports to work. At 11 p.m., her shift ends and she begins the odyssey back home. A little before midnight, she steps off a suburban bus just inside the Detroit border, and waits for the city bus that will get her home by 12:30.

Getting to and from work in the suburbs is a job within itself, but the suburbs offer the best opportunity for Ms. Johnson, 50. "There aren't too many jobs here in Detroit," she said. And those closer to home have another drawback, she said: "The city sort of pays less."

The routine would be far easier if she could just afford a car -- the drive would take only 25 minutes. But here in the Motor City, cars are out of reach for Ms. Johnson and thousands of poor people like her. Only one in four residents owns one. On weekend nights in some of the poorest sections, young men pedal around on bicycles instead of cruising the streets in cars.

But it is in work, not play, where the lack of a set of wheels really haunts Detroiters. Jobs are more plentiful in suburban areas nationwide, and Detroit is no exception. The unemployment rate in this city of one million is 7.2 percent, a vast improvement from the 17 percent rate during the 1992 recession, but more than double the unemployment rates in suburbs. The city, however, has no subway or commuter rail lines in its 140 square miles, and it ranks last in public transportation funding among the 20 largest metro areas nationwide. Even the officials running the city and suburban bus systems acknowledge that public transportation here is inadequate.

So while suburbanites have no trouble driving to jobs downtown, city dwellers without cars find the reverse commute difficult. The result is that suburban businesses have increased their wages and still cannot find enough workers -- fast-food restaurants struggle to fill openings at $7 an hour, well above the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour -- while the city's poor struggle to get to the jobs that would lift them from the welfare or unemployment rolls.

"Low-income families and welfare recipients need to have ready access to jobs and opportunities wherever they exist," said Bruce Katz, director of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan policy at the Brookings Institution. The transportation mismatch is maddening because it "not only undermines the ability of people to get to work in the morning in a timely way, but undermines the ability of corporations to hire workers."

The conundrum of having pools of would-be workers far away from pools of jobs creates inefficiencies in the job market. "This is an absolute historic opportunity because what you have here is the corporate sector at the table and the corporate sector experiencing worker shortages," Katz said.

But many Detroiters have given up trying for suburban jobs. Alice A. Newell, a 32-year-old college graduate who lives in a neighborhood called the Hole, quit work in a suburb a half-hour's drive and a world away from her, where she was helping a retired Ford Motor Co. executive keep track of his investments. The two-hour bus commutes lengthened her work day so much that she could not find affordable and reliable child care. "I just said forget it, I won't go to the suburbs, I'll just work in the city," she said.

But the city bus also brings problems for workers like Ms. Newell, who prays before she heads to the neighborhood bus stop. "Right across the street there's people out selling crack or selling pot, and they all carry guns," said Ms. Newell, who fears going out in the dark mornings with her 4-year-old daughter. And the buses are often late, a particular problem in Detroit's cold winters.

Riders are not the only ones complaining. State legislators and suburban governments, Detroit's mayor and even the chairman of the Chrysler Corp. have voiced concerns about the city's public transportation system, which is as renowned for its poor service as for its political infighting.

Two separate bus systems serve metropolitan Detroit: the city's Department of Transportation oversees routes inside the city, while a suburban government coalition manages suburb-to-suburb routes and the city-to-suburb lines.

"What we have is a system that is woefully lacking in funding," said Albert A. Martin, director of the Detroit department of transportation.

His counterpart in the suburban bus system agrees. "For a number of historical reasons, the metro Detroit area doesn't have a very thorough transportation system," said Richard Kaufman, general manager of the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation, or SMART. "For many years the car companies thought that public transportation was a competitor," a view that has since changed, he said.

Martin, like Mayor Dennis Archer, advocates merging the bus systems, saying the current setup "is wasteful of tax dollars." But Kaufman counters that that is not practical because the suburbs, with a population of almost three million, now contribute a third as much to the bus systems as Detroit does, and suburbanites are unlikely to support increases. In addition, he said, the unions representing city and suburban transportation workers would fight any job cuts that might result from streamlining the operation.

Racial tensions are not far below the surface. For years, the suburban bus routes were designed to avoid matching up too closely with city routes near the Detroit line, making it difficult for city residents, 76 percent of whom are African-Americans, to reach the mostly white suburbs. Even now that service has improved, it is still so inadequate that some transportation experts wonder whether civil rights laws are being violated.

Detroit's dueling bus systems are "a clear case of presenting barriers to people accessing jobs and opportunity," said Katz of Brookings. Because both bus systems receive federal funding, the government should investigate to be sure the rights of minorities and the poor are being upheld, he said.

Leaders of both the suburban and city bus systems rejected the notion that the inadequate bus service constituted a violation of civil rights. "You can get to the suburbs," Martin said. "You may not be able to get out there as frequently as you like."
 

Copyright 1998 The New York Times