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PPI | Policy Report | July 1, 1999
Working Far from Home
Transportation and Welfare Reform in the Ten Big States
By Margy Waller and Mark Alan Hughes
Editor's Note: The full text of this report is available in Adobe PDF format, only. (Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.)
Transportation assistance for low-income workers is complex, expensive, and rife
with unintended consequences. Policymakers
confuse ends and means when job access strategies are too focused on
public
transit systems. The policy challenge is helping
low-income workers get to distant jobs on difficult schedules, but too often both
policymakers
and decisionmakers act as if the
challenge is devising a way to make public transit "good enough" to serve the reverse
commutes
of low-income workers. This
represents both a bias and a blind spot. The bias lies in our willingness to consign poor
people to
barely functioning public systems
from which higher-income citizens routinely withdraw (as in public schools, public
health, public
safety, and public space). The bias
is expressed in the overheard comment of one senior official from a national public
transit
organization, "Show me a thirty-year-old
man on a bus, and I'll show you a failure."
The blind spot is cars. In most cases, the shortest distance between a poor person
and a job is
along a line driven in a car. Prosperity
in America has always been strongly related to mobility and poor people
work hard
for access to opportunities. For both the rural and
inner-city poor, access means being able to reach the prosperous suburbs of our
booming
metropolitan economies, and mobility
means having the private automobile necessary for the trip. The most important
response to the
policy challenge of job access for
those leaving welfare is the continued and expanded use of cars by low-income
workers. Across
the country, state and local
decisionmakers are inventing new programs to do just that and devising new ways that
public
funds can help.
This report presents survey and field research on the ten states with the largest (as
of January
1998) numbers of families receiving
assistance under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Block Grant (TANF),
which is a
mix of federal and matching state
funds. (Throughout this report, we use TANF to refer to both state and federal funds.)
These ten
states collectively represent
two-thirds of the national caseload; they are: California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois,
Michigan,
New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas,
and Washington. We surveyed officials in a variety of relevant state departments and
interviewed
local officials and public transit
operators in cities and rural counties throughout the ten states. This research informs
both our
analysis of transportation assistance
and our recommendations to policymakers.
Our analysis consists of five key points:
First, both rural counties and inner cities are isolated
from the
dispersed job growth generated by suburbanized metropolitan
economies. Lower densities and longer distances generate regressive commuting costs:
lower
income households face time and
money costs that are higher in proportion to their earnings. When combined with the
decline in
wages of lower-skilled jobs,
working families of modest means face a nearly impossible situation.
Second, the work requirements at the heart of welfare
reform
have forced a variety of partial responses to this commuting
dilemma. Transportation is often listed as the leading barrier to getting and keeping a
job for
those leaving welfare. The resources
devoted to transportation assistance are increasing, with both TANF block grant funds
and
supplemental funds from new
programs--such as the Access to Jobs and Reverse Commute Program from the U.S.
Department
of Transportation
(USDOT)--being expended on public transit and its alternatives.
Third, public transit systems operating in many
metropolitan
areas have been rendered obsolete by the suburbanization of
population and employment. These systems were designed to serve an industrial
geography in
which central places were the most
valuable and in which most people lived and worked in high-density environments.
Yet, there is
a bias in both formal program
rules and informal decisions favoring public transit as the job access solution for
low-income
workers. In the worst case scenario,
new subsidies to public transit systems granted in the name of job access can: (1)
consign
low-income workers to long rides on
buses and trains; (2) drain resources from the rest of the transit system, thereby
weakening
services on which many working
families already rely; and (3) encourage further job suburbanization--hardly the goal of
a job
access strategy.
Fourth, private automobiles have been an overlooked
solution
and remain largely taboo in Washington, D.C. and some states. But
local policymakers are recognizing that cars are a necessary part of the job access mix
for
low-income workers and are developing
ways that public funds can help. Some environmentalists, transit advocates, and others
may
object to car-based solutions. And
while clean air, uncongested roads, and farmland preservation are worthy goals, they
should not
impede the job prospects of poor
people being propelled from welfare to work.
Fifth, transportation assistance is an essential
component of any
meaningful commitment to making work pay for families with
modest incomes. Half the states have decided that families should remain eligible for
assistance
regardless of the asset value of
one vehicle (the old AFDC program denied benefits to anyone with a car worth more
than
$1,500). Furthermore, some states
provide ongoing transportation assistance for public transit and/or cars for up to one
year after
employment. While these changes
suggest that policymakers recognize the realities of commuting in metropolitan labor
markets,
they fall far short of what is needed
to meet the job access needs of all low-income, working families.
* * *
In response to this analysis, we offer three broad categories of recommendations to
policymakers. Specific recommendations are
presented in the final section of the report.
State policymakers should base eligibility for transportation assistance on income,
not on
current or recent receipt of welfare. Such
assistance--even using TANF funds--does not trigger the federal TANF
time limits,
including the five-year lifetime limit on
assistance.
State policymakers should use TANF to assist low-income workers with matching
grants
to acquire cars and to provide ongoing
assistance to low-income workers for car operating expenses. State and federal
policymakers
should revise asset limits to permit
the use of one car for each worker in a household without losing eligibility for any low-
income
work support program. State and
local decisionmakers should use TANF to hire transportation coordinators (often
referred to as
mobility managers) to coordinate
new transit alternatives for low-income workers with existing paratransit services for
the elderly
and disabled.
Congress should fully fund the Access to Jobs and Reverse Commute program
under the
U.S. Department of Transportation at the
authorized level of $150 million per year. Grants made under this program should go to
local
public transit systems but these
grants should be restricted to public-private partnerships in which employer
contributions
partially defray the costs of new transit
routes and schedules serving their locations. State and local policy makers should not
use
welfare-to-work grant funds for
transportation assistance because TANF is generally available to fund this service.
Using two
separate funding streams and
agencies to deliver transportation services creates inefficiencies.
This report was supported by a generous grant from The Annie E. Casey
Foundation to
Public/Private Ventures, where the authors were director of policy development and
vice
president, respectively. The preferred citation for this report is: Waller, M. and
Hughes, M.A.
(1999). Working Far From Home: Transportation and Welfare Reform in the Ten
Big
States (Philadelphia, PA: Public/Private Ventures and Washington, DC:
Progressive
Policy Institute).
Margy Waller is the senior fellow for Social Policy at the PPI and is affiliated with the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy. In addition, Waller is the director of the
Working Families Project, a joint initiative of the two organizations. Mark Alan Hughes is distinguished senior scholar at the University of Pennsylvania's Fels Center of Government and a nonresident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution's Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.
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