Detroit has a host of well-documented problems – poverty, crime, street lights, mass transit – that hamper its recovery.
But the ability to create jobs may be its biggest hurdle. More jobs could mean less poverty and more tax revenues to fix the many broken things.
“It’s absolutely critical that Detroit grow jobs,” said Teresa Lynch, nonresident senior fellow at Brookings Institution and a principal at Mass Economics, which is helping the Detroit Future City’s group work on economic development strategies.
A large part of the problem is where jobs are located in the city.
Mike Wilkinson at Bridge Magazine looked at jobs within Detroit’s sprawling boundaries. He shows that perhaps no other large city in the country finds most of its jobs confined to such a tiny sliver of its land, with much of the rest a veritable jobs desert.
(Read the entire report with interactive maps here.)
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