On this Labor Day, let’s talk about one of the most aggravating aspects of many people’s jobs: the business of getting to and from work. Earlier, as part of Daily Kos Elections' ongoing "Most District” series, we talked about the congressional district with the shortest average commute: the largely-rural 1st district in Kansas. That may leave you wondering what the flip side is. In other words, which district’s unfortunate residents must wile away the most time on the nation’s worst commutes?
Much as it may have surprised you to find out that the far-flung 1st boasts the nation’s easiest commutes, you may also be surprised to find out that the longest commute is in one of the nation’s densest, most heavily-urbanized districts: New York’s 5th congressional district, located primarily in the southeastern quarter of Queens (and also a fraction of the southwest corner of Nassau County in suburban Long Island). The mean travel time to work in the 5th is an arduous 48.3 minutes, nearly twice the national average of 26.4 minutes.
The problem for the residents of the 5th is sort of the reverse of what works well in Kansas’s 1st. In KS-01, the small towns are very far apart from each other, but assuming your job is in the same small town as your house, it doesn’t take very long to get from one to the other. In NY-05, on the other hand, very few of the jobs that residents have are located in the district; many of the district’s residents work in lower or midtown Manhattan, which isn’t physically that far away but requires a slow journey by subway, train, or bus that has a lot of stops and starts. And even the main hub of employment found within the district—John F. Kennedy Airport—is, as many travelers know, a rather isolated and impenetrable fortress, ringed by freeways and only disjointedly plugged into the public transit system.
When you think of long commutes, you might instinctively think of people living in the exurbs—people who can’t afford to live near their jobs in the city or inner suburbs, but who still insist on having a single-family residence with a lawn, so they “drive till they qualify.” However, in the 5th district, there aren’t that many single-occupancy car commuters; only 43.3 percent of its workers drive alone to work (compared with 79.7 percent in KS-01), and the very narrow plurality in the 5th, instead, goes to workers who take public transit, at 43.4 percent.
Less so than the residents of Manhattan or close-in parts of Brooklyn, though—who also primarily take mass transit to work—public transit doesn’t get the residents of the 5th to work particularly quickly, going longer distances with more stops. In fact, the top 10 districts in the nation for longest commutes are all found in the outer boroughs of New York City; in 2nd place is NY-08, in the eastern parts of Brooklyn, and in 3rd place is NY-11, mostly on Staten Island.
Aside from the sheer difficulty of building new transit infrastructure through the middle of a major city without causing terrible disruptions, there’s also the problem that the residents of the 5th aren’t likely to be transit planners’ first priority as people that they need to whisk quickly to work. The 5th is a working-class to middle-class district that, like the rest of Queens, is remarkably diverse: in 2015, it was 10 percent non-Hispanic white, 47 percent African-American, 14 percent Asian (primarily South Asian in this part of Queens), and 21 percent Hispanic.
Since the 1950s, neighborhoods at the core of the 5th like Jamaica and Hollis have been some of the principal centers of middle-class black life in New York City—although in the last few decades, an increasingly large part of the black population here is immigrants from Caribbean nations. On the whole, the 5th is not what you’d think of as an economically distressed district, with a poverty rate of 12.1 percent in 2015 (lower than the national average) and a median household income of $65,012 (higher than the national average, though not so comfortable when one factors in the cost of living in New York City … and perhaps not the kind of bargaining power that makes transit planners take much notice of you).
As you might expect with a district that’s in New York City and, on top of that, has few white residents, this is one of the most heavily Democratic CDs in the country. Hillary Clinton received 85.7 percent of the vote here in 2016 with Donald Trump taking 12.7 percent; interestingly, Trump actually improved on Mitt Romney’s 2012 performance of 9.1 percent (with Barack Obama taking 90.6 percent)
This part of Queens (the 5th, and its predecessor district before 2012, the then-6th) has elected an African-American representative since the 1980s, starting briefly with Alton Waldon Jr. and followed by Floyd Flake, the pastor of a prominent local megachurch with a proclivity for endorsing Republican mayoral candidates. Flake resigned partway through his term in 1997, paving the way for one of his allies to replace him, then-state Assemblyman Gregory Meeks.
Meeks has represented southeastern Queens since then, in NY-06 from 1997 until 2012, and, post-redistricting, NY-05 since then. Somewhat like Flake before him, Meeks is one of the less-progressive members of the Congressional Black Caucus (he clocked in as the 79th most liberal member of the 113th Congress according to DW-Nominate, and he is one of the few African-American members of the House’s center-left New Democrat caucus). Meeks is in absolutely no danger in a general election, though, and with the backing of the impermeable Queens Democratic Party machinery behind him, isn’t likely to face a competitive primary challenge either.
“The Most District” is an ongoing series devoted to highlighting congressional district superlatives around the nation. Click here for all posts in this series.