The decentralization of jobs areas that characterized metropolitan growth and development in the early 2000s stalled after the Great Recession, according to a new report, “The Job Sprawl Stalls,” by the Brookings Institution. But the concentration of jobs in the urban core still declined when measured across the decade. Only the Washington region, which experienced a slight uptick in urban-core jobs, proved an exception to the national rule.
One reason for the geographic change in employment patterns is that construction and manufacturing, the most likely to be decentralized, were among the hardest hit during the recession, writes Elizabeth Kneebone.
Kneebone tracked the change in employment in the urban core (within three miles of a Central Business District), between 3 and 10 miles, and between 10 and 35 miles. Viewed over the decade, the urban core of most regions saw a decline in their percentage share of jobs. Here are the numbers for Virginia’s major metros:
Judging from these numbers, the scatteration of jobs was most pronounced in the Richmond region and least pronounced in the Washington region.
A few thoughts… The numbers are somewhat interesting but Kneebone’s decision (perhaps forced by the way the data was collected) to track the change in jobs between 2000 and 2010 may obscure more than it reveals. A little incident called the Great Recession, which brought with it the collapse of the real estate boomed fueled by Wall Street mortgage securitization, marked what some observers believe to be a major inflection point in growth and development.
The first seven years of the decade saw a dramatic shift of jobs toward the urban periphery. The Great Recession and the real estate crash halted or reversed that trend in the last three three years. How marked was that reversal? The data don’t tell us. What has happened in the three years since 2010? The data doesn’t tell us.
Another problem is Kneebone’s choice to impose a standard measure of distance on metropolitan regions of vastly different sizes. Thirty-five miles may be a reasonable radius for the Washington metro. For Richmond, the radius extends halfway to Charlottesville, encompassing a lot of very sparsely populated territory.
I report this data because it’s getting a lot of play in media reports, but I’m really not sure how useful it is.
— JAB
