A Car In Every Garage

By Margy Waller, Washington Monthly. Posted December 1, 2005.

Among the many unpleasant realities exposed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath--from persistent income and racial disparities to the chronic incompetence of the Bush administration--one of the most surprising, to many, was this: our nearly total dependence on automobiles.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the exodus from New Orleans itself. The difference between those who escaped with their lives and loved ones, and those who did not, often came down to access to a car and enough money for gas. Now, in the recovery stage, many of those who were left behind have been evacuated to trailer-park camps, where they are likely to be worse off than they were before, in part because they cannot get to where the jobs are.

Even those Americans who do have cars--and who live nowhere near the Gulf Coast--have been affected by Katrina. After the hurricane, already-high gas prices spiked to record levels--suddenly, it cost $60 to fill up the tank. Prices receded somewhat afterwards. Given worldwide supply and demand issues, prices are more likely to move up than down in the near future, as most Americans understand. No wonder, then, that gas prices top the list of financial concerns in recent polling. These higher prices might be more tolerable if incomes were rising. But in fact, incomes have been flat since 2001 and declined last year for working-age households.

American drivers have taken a number of steps in response to high gas prices. SUV sales, which had already started to slip, plunged further in Katrina's wake while demand for fuel-efficient vehicles like the Toyota Prius soared. But while we can choose to buy hybrids or cut down on trips to the grocery store, the hard truth is that, in a suburbanized country, there is only so much Americans can do to reduce their car usage. To make a living, they have to work. And to get to work, the vast majority of Americans have to drive.

There is a limit to what government can do to reduce gas prices or increase private sector wages, at least in the short term. But it can do something to give middle-class families some relief and low-income workers a leg up--by recognizing that the cost of commuting is a business expense, and changing tax policy to reflect that fact. The federal government should offer tax credits that would lower the cost of commuting to work for low and middle-income employees, and would allow low-income workers who can't afford a reliable car to get one.

Employers, welfare administrators, and the unemployed have long asserted that transportation barriers are a key obstacle to success on the job, so these commuting credits may be the most promising next step for welfare reform. They would help transform the lives of many low-income Americans, giving them a previously unimaginable level of convenience, security, and freedom. And, in a broader sense, after five years of easing the tax burden on those who don't need to work for a living, commuting credits would--for the first time in a long time--give a break to those who do.

Keys to Success

A century ago, getting to work seldom required a lengthy commute. In rural areas, farmers walked out the kitchen door to their jobs. And most urban residents either lived within walking distance of their places of employment or could rely on convenient public transit systems like streetcars. Today, however, two-thirds of residents in metropolitan areas live in the suburbs, and two-thirds of new jobs are located there as well. It's therefore no surprise that 88 percent of workers drive to their jobs.

Left behind in this car culture are central-city poor residents without cars, who have become increasingly isolated from the American economy. As Mark Alan Hughes, William Julius Wilson, and other scholars have documented, the steady movement of jobs out of cities and into the suburbs has helped create and sustain the concentrated poverty that is now endemic to America's urban areas. Because new jobs tend to be located in ever-expanding suburbs, which are poorly served by mass transit, poor central-city residents find themselves living further and further away from economic opportunities. Evelyn Blumenberg, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, found that car-driving residents of the Watts section of Los Angeles have access to an astounding 59 times as many jobs as their neighbors dependent on public transit. Even more isolated are the car-less low-income families that now live in the suburbs--nearly half of all metropolitan poor.

There is reason to believe that not having a car isn't just a consequence of poverty--it's a barrier to escaping it. A significant body of research shows that low-income people with cars work at higher rates, and earn more, than those without. Outside factors like personal motivation--the type of people who get cars are likely to be the type who also get jobs--could go some way to accounting for the difference. But researchers who have evaluated that possibility by looking at existing survey data and at a small program that provides cars to the working poor find that car ownership does indeed directly help people to work, and to earn, more.

Margy Waller served as a domestic adviser in the Clinton-Gore White House. She is based in Washington, DC.

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