Abstract
Growing concern over spatial and skills mismatches has drawn attention to the geography of the low-skilled labor market in the U.S. Using a Geographic Information System, I examine the spatial distributions of low-skilled workers and jobs in Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The results indicate that despite extensive employment suburbanization, central cities still have high concentrations of jobs, providing greater job opportunities than do most suburban areas. Workers are also highly concentrated in central cities but are more widely dispersed than are jobs. In central cities, low-skilled workers have fewer job opportunities than do high-skilled workers. In the suburbs, on the other hand, job opportunities are greater for low-skilled workers than for high-skilled workers, but this difference is relatively small.
