Jobs and good mass transit are two big problems for Detroit.
Mike Wilkinson of Bridge Magazine reports that Detroit's ability to create jobs may be its biggest hurdle, along with the fact too few people have cars and access to transportation to get to jobs further away. The lion's share of the jobs are in the city's central business district, in downtown and Midtown.
Wilkinson writes:
A large part of the problem is where jobs are located in the city.
A Bridge 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, neighborhoods that are miles away from where most jobs can be found, both in and outside of the city. Nearly 80 percent of city residents live over 10 miles from a centralbusiness district, one of the highest rates of the country.
Detroit struggles with "jobs desert."
Wilkinson goes on to write:
As Mayor Mike Duggan and civic leaders work to take advantage of the city’s Midtown-Downtown economic corridor, they are 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, a struggle since the large manufacturing plants that were spread across the city closed long ago. The jobs and population figures represent how many exist within a given ZIP code. Zoom out to see other parts of the state.
