A Recent Mismatch of the Poor

Covington, Kenya L. "Spatial Mismatch of the Poor: An Explanation of Recent Declines in Job Isolation." Journal of Urban Affairs. Blackwell Publishing, December 2009. Web. 7 November 2011.

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Kenya Covington's article, "Spatial Mismatch of the Poor: An Explanation of Recent Declines in Job Isolation" describes how the poor's access to jobs is not available as it should be, but it is increasing. It starts by examining the changes in job opportunity over the years since 1990 and whether or not it has improved or if it has not. The ending results were that the job opportunities for the poor have increased by the smallest amount and most of the improvement was specifically shown in the population of the black poor. Covington talks about the major decline of racism in the United States since the very beginning of the 1990's. The main factor is that the blacks have had more opportunity in our society and that is what has caused the smallest improvement of minimal job opportunity in the United States. He states, "To begin, the first limitation of the extant literature stems from its failure to explore job isolation for the poor specifically. Despite decades of empirical analysis supporting the theory, these analyses have not examined access to jobs for the poor as an individual group nor have they explored whether job access for this population has changed significantly over time." Kenya Covington examines the decrease in racism in the United States and businesses giving more job opportunity to the black population.

This relates back to my research question because it significantly talks about the job isolations that have been going on in the United States. The poor’s access to jobs is less known, especially relative to the nonpoor’s access. Since the poor tend to reside close together, and are segregated largely from the nonpoor, it is believed that access to job opportunities will increase in the next five years due to economic incline. In this article, this question is examined as well as whether, in fact, the distributional imbalance between poor families and jobs is greater than that between nonpoor families and jobs. This also brings up the issue of race and whether this is a factor in why the income gap has slowly been closing in the past twenty years. This brings up the question of whether or not the rich should be prosecuted financially in order to help the poor obtain jobs because the gap is continuing to close. Kenya Covington has a stance that the poverty levels will decrease in the next five years without any government help; just simply because of the turn around of the recent recession.