The big idea: Combat 'Job Sprawl'

What it means and why it's a good thing:

 

Over the last half-century, the geography of employment has changed radically. Cheap energy, economic subsidies and short-sighted tax policy provided incentives for businesses to locate at, or relocate to, the regions' edges. Now, fewer jobs are in core cities.

Yet even before the recent energy and economic crises, smart leaders recognized that the purported savings of "job sprawl" are - like housing sprawl - offset by significant, if sometimes hidden, costs.

Among them: the need to build new infrastructure, including highways that immediately become clogged with traffic. (See: Blue Route).

In addition, decentralized employment creates a severe imbalance in public transportation - not enough in the suburbs and "edges," underused in the city. Job sprawl leads to what's called "spatial mismatch" between jobs and many workers, especially minority workers, increasing income disparity.

Less tangible, but no less critical: Evidence suggests that the closer jobs are to each other, the more innovation results. For example, patents for inventions increase with job density.

How does Philadelphia

stack up?

 

First the good news: The diversity of Philadelphia's economy - which includes universities, medical centers, pharmaceuticals and other high-tech industries, tourism and some manufacturing - has cushioned the blow of the recent economic downturn. The national employment rate declined by 3.3 percent between January 2008 and January 2009, but the Philadelphia metro region's number fell by only 1.7 percent, according to the annual report of the Center City District.

The not-so-good news:

 

The Philadelphia region's overall job sprawl ranked fifth worst among 98 metropolitan areas in 2006, according to a recent report by the Brookings Institution. In the Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington region, 63.7 percent of the jobs are more than 10 miles from city centers. Only 15.5 percent were within three miles of downtown.

At first glance, the decentralization of jobs may seem to benefit the edges of the region; in fact, the reverse is true. A multitude of studies show that suburbs can't thrive when their core cities are in distress. In fact, when incomes rise in cities, so do incomes and home prices in the suburbs.

Best example: