Detroiters Without Cars Seek Jobs in Vain as City Shrinks

Feb. 18 (Bloomberg)-- The predawn buses that Detroiter Greg Rich rode 20 miles to a suburban auto-parts plant were late so often he was fired in January.

The 27-year-old high-school graduate has no car and spent a year job-hunting before he took the $7.40-an-hour position that lasted only seven months. He said Detroit has no jobs for him and those in suburbs are unreachable.

“I’m very frustrated,” Rich said in a phone interview during another day of searching the Internet for employment. “The jobs now aren’t even in Michigan. I’m looking for work in Atlanta. I have friends in Colorado who tell me, ‘You’ve got to move. There’s nothing there.’”

Detroit had the lowest rate of adults working or looking for employment in a 2012 federal survey. Merely getting to a job when it exists can be an insurmountable challenge in community built for cars whose footprint is big enough to encompass Boston, San Francisco and Manhattan. Twenty-six percent of the households in the insolvent former capital of auto manufacturing lacked a vehicle, compared with 9 percent nationally, according to a 2013 study by the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Transportation Research Institute.

“Everything starts with a job,” Mayor Mike Duggan said in a phone interview. “We need jobs in the city and we need to be able to transport people to where the jobs are.”

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-18/detroiters-without-cars-seek-jobs-in-vain-amid-depopulated-city.html