The Brookings Institute just discovered the jobs are moving to the suburbs along with people. According to their press release, this decades-old trend “undermines long-term regional [and] national prosperity.”
“Allowing jobs to shift away from city centers hurts economic productivity, creates unsustainable and energy inefficient development, and limits access to underemployed workers,” says Brookings senior fellow Robert Puentes. But neither he nor the author of the study, Elizabeth Kneebone, actually proves that any of these things will happen — or how we’ve managed to survive for so long in the face of this adversity.
The study itself uses the curious procedure of measuring changes in job numbers within three miles, three to ten miles, and outside of ten miles of downtown. That would be fine if all metro areas covered the same geographic area, but the urban areas reviewed by Brookings ranged from Atlanta, which covers 2,000 square miles, to Trenton, which covered less than 100 square miles in 2000.
Not surprisingly, Trenton was found to have a lot less job sprawl than Atlanta. “The larger the metro area,” the study insightfully observed, “the more likely people are to work more than 10 miles away from downtown.” Well, duh.
