Achieving Economic Mobility, Prosperity and Opportunity: What the Bay Area Can Do

This editorial first appeared in the San Francisco Business Times on October 31, 2014.

There is a lot of talk and growing awareness around issues like persistent poverty and income inequality. Solutions, when they are presented, often seem far-fetched — such as Thomas Piketty’s proposed global wealth tax. But just because the obstacles are significant does not mean they cannot be tackled.

At the core are the following overlapping realities: Growth of jobs exists primarily at the top and bottom end of the labor market. Many people earn low wages and have few paths to increase them. The share of employment in the middle is declining and the industries that once occupied the middle — like manufacturing — are increasingly less labor intensive. Add to this persistent challenges like limited funding for K-12 education, rising student debt and tuition for post-secondary education, stagnant wages for many workers, and a growing income gap between those with a college degree and those without.

Many hear about these challenges and are overwhelmed by their complexity and seeming intractability. Others think they are not affected by them. Still others gravitate to a narrow solution: Either improve education or raise the minimum wage.

The truth is that we can tackle these issues, but we must use many different approaches. While it would be easier to reduce poverty with significant investment and policies at the state and federal levels, major actions can be taken at the local and regional scale — and there are people currently working to solve these problems in the Bay Area.

SPUR and a group of partner organizations recently released the Bay Area Economic Prosperity Strategy, a region-wide plan for what the Bay Area can do to improve economic opportunities for the region’s 1.1 million lower-wage workers who earn less than $18 per hour. Here's what the strategy recommends:

1. Strengthen career pathways to middle-wage jobs. This means helping individuals overcome barriers like skill gaps and access to good job networks to secure good-paying jobs (like health care, construction and tech support) that do not require a college degree.

2. Grow the economy with a focus on middle-wage work. This means building significant new housing and reinvesting in the region’s industrial lands. It also means moving towards subregional housing allocation and planning approvals, improved regional transit connectivity, regional permit processes and fees, regional tax sharing and revenue agreements.

3. Improve conditions for workers in lower-wage jobs. This means continuing to explore policies like increases to the minimum wage with common labor standards across several cities or counties.

The Bay Area has done a great job maintaining conditions for a robust economy, with significant growth in high-wage jobs. To maintain economic diversity and ensure that all our region’s residents have access to opportunity, we need to take this proactive approach and do so regionally.

Read the Economic Prosperity Strategy >>