The table below collates job centralization not by CBD as in this post but by central city. Parisian data comes from INSEE, here and here; American data comes from Wikipedia for population and OnTheMap for job counts. In general, I tried making the central city definition about 18% of the metro area to be comparable with Paris, but there is still a lot of variation, so this table should absolutely not be read as a ranking of metro areas by job centralization.
|New York||19,979,477||8,364,410||Manhattan, Brooklyn||4,313,498||2,905,675||34.7%|
|Los Angeles||13,291,486||5,372,008||Downtown LA to Santa Monica||~1,500,000||1,051,648||19.6%|
|Houston||6,997,384||2,791,647||Inside 610 + Uptown||~650,000||749,661||26.9%|
|Washington||6,249,950||2,717,790||District, Arlington, Alexandria||1,100,496||859,751||31.6%|
|Miami||6,198,782||2,308,048||Miami, Miami Beach||563,221||324,260||14%|
|Bay Area||4,729,484||2,121,580||San Francisco||883,305||642,375||30.3%|
There appears to be a fair amount of job centralization in the Sunbelt cities, right? In Metro Atlanta, Fulton County has a slightly higher proportion of regional jobs than Paris with a slightly lower share of residential population.
But actually, no. Absolute densities matter in addition to relative centralization of jobs versus residences. In Houston and Los Angeles the central areas are drawn to encircle the downtown and near-downtown job centers – both cities preferentially annex suburban job sites so using municipal boundaries is not useful. A hefty share of area jobs are in these centers, especially in Houston. But ultimately it’s still not a lot of jobs in a very large land area, around 300 square kilometers for both, compared with 100 for the city of Paris or for San Francisco. Fulton County is vast, and the jobs are distributed all over Atlanta and its northern suburbs within the county.
Houston is a particularly good example of monocentrism with a weak center. There are not a lot of strong suburban job centers in Houston – nothing like Silicon Valley, Downtown Newark, the Route 128 corridor, La Defense, Burbank, or Tysons Corner. The city itself has about two thirds of area jobs, thanks to selective annexations. But the share of the CBD in area jobs is low, just 150,000 jobs in the 45/69/10 beltway, or 5.3% of area jobs. Outside the CBD job density plummets, as the outlying job centers making the difference between 5.3% and 26.9% are located at haphazard locations all over 610.
Older American cities
The extent of centralization in the Northeast, Chicago, and San Francisco is greater. New York in particular is a lot like Paris, with about a third of area jobs in a high-density contiguous blob consisting of less than one fifth of regional population. It has nothing like La Defense in the suburbs, but its suburban job centers, while much smaller, include some recognizably dense ones, especially Newark and the Jersey City waterfront. One needs to go well into suburbia to see the difference between Paris, where the suburbs have a structure of density with mid- and high-rise residential development as well as offices next to train stations, and New York, where the job centers in farther-out suburbia, like Central Jersey, have no such structure and are located exclusively based on auto access.
Boston, Washington, and San Francisco all have varying degrees of centralization. I mentioned last year that Boston is increasingly an example of European-style job sprawl, in which jobs spill over from the CBD to nearby areas rather than to faraway office parks. New York has long had such spillover – Long Island City is such a job center, and may at this point have more jobs than Downtown Brooklyn; the Jersey City waterfront is another such example, as is the growth of the Meatpacking District around Google. In Boston the equivalents are Kendall Square and the Seaport; in San Francisco it’s SoMa; in Washington it’s jobs in Arlington around the Orange Line, where older TOD was residential.
Chicago and Philadelphia are the least centralized. Chicago has a well-defined supertall skyline with about 500,000 people working in or near the Loop. But outside that central area, job density craters. Chicago’s share of metro area jobs is about 1.5% higher than its share of metro population, and if we remove the airport, surrounded by suburbia, this difference drops to 0.5%. Philadelphia’s share of metro area jobs is actually lower than its share of metro area population by 1.5%. In these regions, if you’re not working in city center, you’re working at an office park in a middle-class-to-rich suburb built without regard for the area’s vast legacy mainline rail network.