Robert Gibbs

Low Skill Employment and the Changing Economy of Rural America

This study reports trends in rural low-skill employment in the 1990s and their impact on the rural workforce. The share of rural jobs classified as low-skill fell by 2.2 percentage points between 1990 and 2000, twice the decline of the urban low-skill employment share, but much less than the decline of the 1980s. Employment shifts from low-skill to skilled occupations within industries, rather than changes in industry mix, explain virtually all of the decline in the rural low-skill employment share. The share decline was particularly large for rural Black women, many of whom moved out of low-skill blue-collar work into service occupations, while the share of rural Hispanics who held low-skill jobs increased.

Mobility of Section 8 families in Alameda County

During the 1990s, Section 8 vouchers were touted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as the way to provide greater housing choice for the poor while deconcentrating them. Toward the end of the 1990s however evidence mounted that the voucher system was not deconcentrating the poor. In response HUD developed a set of five major demonstration programs that supplemented the vouchers with carious arrays of social services. While waiting for results from these programs to return, HUD discovered that Section 8 participants in local housing authorities in Alameda County, California, were experiencing an unexpected amount of interjuridictional modebility toward suburban locations. Using a local database of 16,591 Section 8 families, this paper presents a cursory examination into the motivations of their suburban mobility.