America today is increasingly defined by the overlapping divides of class and place. The country’s geography can be characterized as winner-take-all, with high-paying knowledge jobs disproportionately concentrated in coastal superstar cities, leading-edge tech hubs, and elite college towns, as large spans of the country lag far behind.
A new Brookings Institution study released this week adds to our understanding of this key trend in our uneven economic geography, documenting the deepening divide in job density across the nation.
The study, by researchers Chad Shearer, Jennifer S. Vey, and Joanne Kim, examines the degree to which jobs are concentrating or dispersing across 94 of America’s largest metro areas, which contain roughly two-thirds of all jobs. To get at this, the study uses unique data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Origin-Destination Employment Statistics program (or LODES), which links home and work locations for census blocks.
One caveat about the data: Because of issues with state-level reporting, it excludes six of the nation’s largest 100 metros: Boston and several other smaller Massachusetts metros; Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin; the parts of Providence that lie in Massachusetts; and parts of Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul that lie in Wisconsin. The study measures “weighted” or “perceived” job density. While the standard measure of job density basically calculates the jobs per land area, this report uses a measure of perceived job density that calculates job density of the place where the average job is located.
Overall, job density increased significantly between 2004 and 2015, according to the study, rising from about 20,000 jobs per square mile in 2004 to nearly 26,000 in 2015—an increase of ..
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