'Job sprawl' a problem in Orange: study - recordonline.com - The Times Herald Record
Job sprawl' a problem in Orange: study
Undermines mass transit
By Chris Mckenna
Times Herald-Record
Posted: April 12, 2009 - 2:00 AM
You've heard of suburban sprawl, the pernicious development pattern that eats up too much land, overextends water and sewer lines and makes Americans slaves to their cars.
Now a Washington think tank is taking aim at an associated phenomenon it dubs "job sprawl," and it has found the scattering of jobs throughout Orange and Dutchess counties to be an egregious example.
A new report by the Brookings Institution indicates that 67 percent of the 161,217 private-sector jobs in those counties that are within 35 miles of Poughkeepise are more than 10 miles from that city's downtown — the hallmark of sprawl for this national study.
That percentage ranked the two counties as the most decentralized "small employment center" — one with fewer than 500,000 jobs — among all areas included in the study, which analyzed the 100 places in the U.S. with the highest job totals.
It also placed the region in the same sprawl league as Dallas and Los Angeles.
Why worry? For starters, the migration of jobs from city centers demands the costly extension of water and sewer lines and shrinks the cities' tax base, the report's authors argue.
It also increases commuting time, undermines mass transit and further isolates poor city dwellers, who are left with fewer employment options.
No need to explain this to Jonathan Drapkin, president and CEO of Pattern for Progress, a Newburgh-based nonprofit that promotes smart growth and economic development.
"Our cities are amongst the oldest in the Brookings report, so we may be like the canary in the mine — the first harbinger of a trend," Drapkin said.
He expects the local job climate to worsen, but he regards the recession as a catalyst rather than an impediment to new approaches such as transit-oriented development.
One flaw in the Brookings study is that Poughkeepsie is its only focal point, leaving the only slightly smaller cities of Newburgh and Middletown consigned to the "sprawl" section of the employment map.
That means jobs located squarely in those downtowns are counted in the total that made the region tops in sprawl.
But few would regard those cities as booming employment hubs or dispute the overall picture of a region with scattered employers.
One glimmer of good news: however decentralized the local job picture, the pace at which jobs have left Poughkeepsie was relatively modest between 1998 and 2006, the time period analyzed in the study.
cmckenna@th-record.com
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