Putting Northeast Ohio workers on the map: The road to employment begins with worker mobility

EmpowerBus


If she could afford a car, Antaneshia Fletcher could drive to her job at Bloom Artisan Bakery & Café in less than 20 minutes. Instead, she rises at 4:30 am every day so she can spend two hours taking the two bus routes necessary to travel from her home in Euclid to the store near the Cleveland State University campus by 6:30 am.

The friendly though soft-spoken 25-year-old could take an Uber, but she estimates that would cost about $22 per day. Occasionally, she catches a ride, but mostly she listens to music or reads on her phone to wile away her four-hour journey to and from downtown (and that’s assuming everything is on time).

Antaneshia Fletcher“Sometimes I have to call my boss and tell her I’ll be late because a bus broke down or is running late,” says Fletcher. “But she’s cool with it, because she knows where I live.”

Fletcher isn't alone: Worker mobility or transportation to available employment stands as a barrier for many people who live in urban areas or are spread throughout Northeast Ohio.

“The effects of suburban sprawl really go back several decades,” says Brett Barkley, a data scientist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. “It accelerated in the 60s and 70s with the construction of the Interstate Highway System, suburbanization and white flight, during which residents who could afford to move to the suburbs did. A lot of businesses and jobs relocated to the suburbs to follow the workforce.”

Sprawl’s shadow is, of course, shaped by an undercurrent of racial disparity. Current demographic statistics indicate that 25.5 percent of Cleveland’s black residents don’t own a car, compared to 6.8 percent of white residents. That percentage increases in high-poverty areas.

For example, in the Central neighborhood, which is 90 percent black, an estimated 56 percent of its residents doesn’t possess a vehicle.

To highlight the current job access challenges, Barkley cites the fact that while Solon is home to the largest concentration of low-skilled jobs in Cuyahoga County, it is very difficult to reach by public transit.

Brett Barkley“Our research from a few years ago indicates that only about 28 percent of Cuyahoga County workers can commute by transit to Solon in under 90 minutes, while commuting by car would take only 20 to 25 minutes,” he says. “In fact, only 12 percent of all Northeast Ohio workers, which includes the entire Cleveland and Akron Metropolitan Statistical Area, can commute there by transit.”

From the employer's perspective, the Cleveland Federal Reserve’s report indicates that half of Northeast Ohio’s top 10 employment centers have access to just 15 percent or less of the regional workforce.

At the heart of this transportation challenge is a paradox that can be articulated in several ways but basically boils down to this: No car, no job. No job, no car. Academic researchers and public policy makers have grappled with the issue for decades.

One company that is trying to diminish the transportation burden is Fletcher’s employer, Towards Employment, a nonprofit workforce development agency that connects people to careers. Towards Employment also owns Bloom Bakery, which hires individuals who face barriers to steady employment with the goal of providing fundamental training in culinary arts.

"Ant," as Fletcher is known to friends and regulars, is a member of the retail team responsible for taking all catering orders. She quickly built a reputation for being a dependable employee with a can-do attitude.

RTA Euclid Avenue stopAccording to sales manager Kristina Clark, Towards Employment supports employees like Ant by offering free weekly bus passes as part of its retention efforts—in light of the fact that the majority of Bloom Bakery employees ride the bus for more than two hours each way to get to work.

Employees can also apply for transportation loan programs, which includes paying off fines to get a driver’s license back or making a down payment on a car. Then, Towards Employment gives employees gas cards to help defray their transportation costs.

“In the same way we always work to make sure our customers get first-rate food, we want to ensure that our employees get a second chance,” Clark says. “So we try to help them navigate life’s obstacles and build their careers any way we can.”

On a more macro level for Northeast Ohio, other effective solutions are starting to emerge, starting with a new initiative from The Fund for Our Economic Future in June. The Paradox Prize is a public competition that will fund ideas to bridge the gap between individual car ownership and a 64-passenger bus ride.

RTA Red Line“We’re aiming to address the transportation paradox of ‘no car, no job; no job no car,’” explains Bethia Burke, vice president for the Fund. “We know that lack of transportation access disproportionately cuts off residents in minority communities from jobs. This is the result of longstanding policies and practices like redlining that have driven development in a segregated way. Job growth has occurred in places that are increasingly farther away from a concentration of the population.”

The Paradox Prize effort is also taking into account the widening range of transportation options for workers—who no longer choose just between owning a car or riding the bus but instead may consider multiple alternatives such as car pooling, on-demand car services (e.g., TransLoc or Lyft structured in partnership with transit agencies and private employers), ride-sharing, or van pooling services. Today, the availability of data and modeling capabilities enables municipalities to explore various ways to improve worker mobility and bridge that transportation gap.

To further explore those solutions, The Fund has partnered with the National Fund for Workforce Solutions—which contributed a $600,000 grant to the project—along with Greater Cleveland Partnership, DriveOhio, and The Lozick Family Foundation to launch an up to $1 million, multi-year Transportation Paradox Prize.

EmpowerBusDuring the next three years, through a series of rolling deadlines, the Paradox Prize will provide funding to support up to 15 innovative pilot projects that will “help Northeast Ohioans stranded economically by geography connect to tens of thousands of open positions.”

According to Burke, the Fund will begin accepting submissions for The Paradox Prize the first week of June, and anyone with a good idea is eligible to apply.

One neighborhood-based solution provider that plans to submit a proposal is EmpowerBus of Columbus. While the organization’s mission is to furnish workforce, education and healthcare transportation, its current focus is providing workforce transportation. The organization works closely with businesses in Central Ohio, such as Worthington Industries or Abercrombie & Fitch, to offer transportation for employees with limited options. EmpowerBus plans to expand into several peer cities including Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Louisville.

Aslyne RodriguezAslyne Rodriguez, co-founder and CEO of EmpowerBus, says discussing futuristic solutions such as Jetson-style flying cars is wonderful, but cities need immediate solutions to serve residents who need transportation.

“We’ve got to be forward-thinking and look at those advancements in technology, but we also have to say right now, today, what is happening and how are people getting to work,” she states. “If those methods don’t serve all, then that just continues to exacerbate the situation between those who have and those who don’t.”