Where the Jobs Are: Urban, Suburban, & Rural Migrations

By George Lorenzo, originally published on July 28, 2021 at Workforce Monitor

According to a 2020 brief published by the University of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems:

• About 83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas, a jump of 19% since 1950. That 83% is expected to climb to 89% by 2050. 
• From 2000 to 2010, the amount of urban land grew by 15% and is still growing today. Urban sprawl into surrounding suburbs puts pressure on traffic patterns and energy usage, and often contributes to an increase in air and water pollution and flooding. 
• Eighty-eight percent of all jobs are located in U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), and poverty rates are lower inside MSAs as opposed to outside (11.3% vs 14.7% respectively). 
• “A sustainable urban area is characterized by the preservation of a quality environment, efficient use of renewable energy resources, the maintenance of a healthy population with access to health services, and the presence of economic vitality, social equity, and engaged citizenry.”

As the U.S. navigates its post-COVID future, is it possible to prognosticate how our cities will continue to play a major role in growing and sustaining our economy and providing individuals with good jobs and a healthy standard of living?

The “Great Divergence” - In 2012, Enrico Moretti, an economics professor from University of California, Berkeley, wrote “The New Geography of Jobs,” an award-winning book on how cities shape our future. Moretti claimed that a “handful of cities with the ‘right’ industries and a solid base of human capital keep attracting good employers and offering high wages, while those at the other extreme, cities with the ‘wrong’ industries and a limited human capital base, are stuck with dead-end jobs and low average wages.” He called this a “Great Divergence” that originated in the 1980s, as major U.S. cities stated to define themselves according to the number of their college-educated residents. Those cities with high numbers of college educated residents attracted more college educated residents, while those cities with smaller college-educated populations “started losing ground.” 

The Creative Class - Ten years before Moretti’s book came out, popular urban planner Richard Florida wrote in “The Creative Class” that urban success can only be achieved by attracting knowledge workers, techies, and artists to their city limits. He argued that successful cities were those that focused on technology, talent, and tolerance. “They had clusters of technology industry; they had great school systems and research universities that produced talent; and they were open-minded and tolerant, which allowed them to attract and retain talent regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.” 

The New Urban Crisis - However, Florida claimed later, in his 2017 book “The New Urban Crisis,” that his depiction of the Creative Class and urban success was overly optimistic because the migration of the Creative Class to the cities accelerated a growing gap between the rich and poor. “As techies, professionals, and the rich flowed back into urban cores, the less advantaged members of the working and service classes, as well as some artists and musicians, were being priced out.”

The State of Things Today - Jumping ahead four-years to today and another picture is emerging that is based on how the pandemic wrought significant change to our nation’s labor force. How will education and training meet its changing needs? Are folks migrating to different geographic regions than in the past? What industries are coming back to pre-COVID normal? 

USA Facts reports in a July 23, 2021 article that: 

• June employment reached 145.8 million, 4.4% below February 2020, and the national unemployment rate slightly increased from 5.8% to 5.9%. 
• Some 850,000 jobs were added in June. 
• In Nebraska and South Dakota, unemployment rates dropped to below pre-pandemic levels.
• Fourteen states were noted as having bigger civilian labor forces than previous to the pandemic.
• The most jobs were created in leisure and hospitality, but this sector still showed 13% fewer positions when compared to February 2020. 
• Government was the second highest sector to create the most jobs. 
• Combined, leisure and government tallied 62.5% of June job growth. 
• June earnings came in at 10 cents higher than May and was noted as “the highest inflation-adjusted average since the BLS started reporting data in 2006.” 
• The number of people working from home dropped by 2.2% since May. 
• Non-farm jobs increased in 25 states, with only Alaska showing a .9% employment drop, while Arizona and Nevada had the best job increases at 1.3% and 1.2% respectively. 
• Unemployment rose in Florida, Iowa, and Kansas and was stable everywhere else in the U.S.
• Connecticut and New Mexico had the highest unemployment rates at 7.9%, and Nebraska and Utah had the lowest rates at 2.5%% and 2.7% respectively. 
• Oregon, Oklahoma, and Utah’s had the highest civilian labor force growth since the pandemic. 

For daily updates, see the USA Facts Recovery Hub, which tracks “the nation’s recovery from various data angles, from the unemployment rate to personal income to state tax revenue.”

Where the Jobs Aren’t - In “Workforce Education,” published by MIT Press in 2021, William B. Bonvillian and Sanjay E. Sarma echo Moretti’s Great Divergence and Florida’s wealth gap. They write that “More than fifty million people live in districts stuck in the equivalent of an ongoing recession, with a falling number of businesses and in which the local population has low median income, poor labor force participation, high levels of poverty, and low educational achievement.” These areas have high housing vacancy and unemployment rates, and they underscore “the uneven aspects of US economic ‘recovery’ since the Great Recession.”

These less prosperous communities in the U.S. are populated in large part by minorities. “Blacks and Native Americans are three times more likely to live in a distressed community than a prosperous one. . . The new economic geography has brought economic and social cleavages that have spawned problematic externalities: entrenched poverty, ‘deaths of despair,’ and deepening small-town resentment of coastal cosmopolitan elites. In the poorest-performing areas, economic stability continues to erode.”

A study by Jeffrey Lin in 2011 found that new kinds of work typically concentrate in metropolitan areas with a variety of industries and a high population of college graduates, suggesting that metros “may be better able to weather globalization [and a pandemic] and to benefit from technology advances that may disrupt labor markets.”

The Hollowing Out of the Middle-Skill Jobs - Educated folks move to urban centers to take advantage of high wages paid by innovative companies. Folks without any higher education are seeing a smaller labor force marketplace, with clerical and production job opportunities down, “and white-collar work is harder to reach because the rungs are further apart now when less educated workers try to climb occupational ladders in these urban areas,” resulting in a kind of hollowing out of middle-skill jobs. 

Research by economist David Autor, found that production workers, sales employees, office workers, and machine operators (middle-skill jobs)—made up 60 percent of American jobs in 1979, but had fallen to 46 percent by 2012. Jobs that entail taking care of others, however, increased. Over the past 30 years, personal care, food and cleaning services, and protective services had grown by double digits in the 1990s – and these jobs have low education requirements. High-end jobs that require a four-year degree in, for example, managerial, professional, and/or technical occupations, have also grown in numbers. “Even during the Great Recession and its aftermath, these categories experienced almost no decline in employment.” Autor added that this hollowing out of middle-skill work has impacted individuals with less than a college education in both urban and rural areas. 

The pandemic worsened this problem. Today many middle-skill workers are not finding decent job opportunities, worsening wage polarization and heralding a thinning out of the middle class. “A quarter of working adults are stuck in jobs that don’t provide living wages, health insurance, or expectations for upward economic mobility, a status that crosses all races and ethnic groups, including native-born and immigrants.”

Rural Effects - In a section of “Workforce Education” titled “Rural Effects,” Bonvillian and Sarma explain that the once rich agricultural economy in rural areas across the country have become industrialized and massive, calling farms “factories with dirt floors” that today need fewer workers because of the historical development of large industrial farm equipment, including those operated by modern autonomous technologies, that can do the work of many humans. “With far fewer farm laborers, and with the major acreage now required, fewer own farms. The children in farm families leave for cities in large numbers.” 

The authors called this the “ruralizaton of distress,” a situation in which rural areas not located close to larger metro areas lose large swaths of their population. In 2016, the median age in rural counties was 43 while in cities it was 36. Plus, median incomes are lower, and many businesses were lost in the Great Recession and now during the pandemic as well. “By 2017, large metropolitan areas had 10 percent more jobs than when the recession began, but rural areas had fewer—and with the opioid epidemic, drug addiction, once primarily an urban problem, has become a rural one. According to the Department of Agriculture, almost a quarter of the children growing up in rural America in 2016 were being raised in poverty—and the situation is becoming more pervasive.”

A Demographic Shift - Despite the larger number of job opportunities continuing to grow in cities, millennials are increasingly choosing to live in the suburbs instead of the cities, according to a June 1, 2021 article in Forbes. The article referred to a study conducted by Zillow that showed how 47% of millennial homeowners live outside of cities because they purchased relatively larger homes available to them in suburban and rural communities as opposed to in cities. They moved to communities outside of cities regardless of the job commute they must encounter as they continue to work within city limits where the good jobs are located. The growth of remote work, however, has made the commute more palatable to employees as employers become more open to intermittent commutes and hybrid work arrangements.    

As noted in the Forbes piece, “the shift to suburban living could have interesting effects on the rising costs of urban living . . . Overall, millennials are approaching and treating the homebuying process in an entirely new, modern way, which could have implications across the economy in the future.”

In a March 30, 2021 article published by SmartAsset, Financial Writer Ben Geier looked at Census Bureau data to explain why and where millennials are moving. Some of his key findings include:

• New York City lost 40,000 millennials in 2019, and Chicago lost 11,000 millennials. Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston, and Miami also had net millennial migration losses.
• Cities in states with no income taxes, such as Seattle, Washington; Austin, Texas; Frisco, Texas; Henderson, Nevada; and Cape Coral, Florida, are attracting millennials.
• “More than 187,000 people between the ages of 25 and 39 moved to Texas in 2019, while nearly 154,000 left, creating a net gain in millennial residents of more than 33,000 – the biggest gain for this generational group in the country.”
• Colorado also had big millennial migration inflows, as well as the states of Washington and Arizona.

SmartAsset listed the top 10 cities where millennials are moving:

1. Denver, CO 
2. Seattle, WA
3. Phoenix, AZ
4. Austin, TX
5. Colorado Springs, CO
6. Frisco, TX
7. Cary, NC
8. Portland, OR
9. Henderson, NV
10. Cape Coral, FL