The Geography of Jobs data visualization we first created in the spring of 2008 has been updated through November 2011. The animated map shows the net change in jobs over a rolling 12-month period in the top 100 metropolitan areas (by population). In layman’s terms, the size of the bubbles on the map represent the net change in jobs from April ’09 to April ’10 (for example), and so on.

About the Map
This animated map provides a striking visual of employment trends over the last business cycle using net change in jobs from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on a rolling 12-month basis. The animation highlights a number of concurrent trends leading up to the Great Recession, as well as evidence of a recovery.

The Dot-Com Bust & Recovery
The timeline begins in 2004 as the national economy recovered from the bursting of the dot-com bubble. At first, broad economic growth was apparent across most of the country. Two notable exceptions are the Bay Area — the hub of the tech boom that drove job growth during the prior decade — and several metropolitan areas within the Midwest. The map reveals that much of the industrial Midwest never fully recovered: manufacturers shed jobs while other parts of the country were adding them.

The Housing Bubble & Hurricane Katrina
The nation’s appetite for new homes is also evident. During the middle of the decade, job growth related to construction and real-estate occurred in Sun Belt states, such as California, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona. The map also captures dramatic job losses in New Orleans in 2005 as a result of Hurricane Katrina, as well as the city’s slow recovery driven largely by construction-related employment.

The Downturn Begins
By 2007, regional evidence of the coming economic downturn began to appear. Employment growth in California and Florida waned, with actual losses becoming evident in Los Angeles and Tampa. Layoffs also accelerated in the nation’s manufacturing heartland. By the first quarter of 2008, job losses in the Southeast and Midwest spread, setting off a chain of losses in neighboring areas. The same pattern was seen on the West Coast, with the epicenter in Los Angeles marching eastward to the Front Range of the Rockies.

Manhattan is an Island. Or is it?
As much of the nation was showing clear signs of entering a recession, New York City continued to boom as the flow of easy credit stimulated employment growth in the nation’s financial center. In late spring 2007, however, the financial bubble burst and New York experienced severe losses. Texas benefited from the run-up in oil prices through the middle of 2008, but began to recede by January 2009 as the energy and construction sectors weakened.

The Great Recession
Through early and mid-2009, job losses intensified across the country with layoffs peaking in August. At that time, the nation’s largest metropolitan areas New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago had also shed the greatest number of jobs from the previous year. For example, the Los Angeles metropolitan area had seen a net decrease in employment of 426,000. None of the top 100 MSAs had been immune to mass layoffs. The map shows that the bleeding had begun to stop in the fall of 2009.

A Reticent Recovery
In early 2010, the first signs of over-the-year job expansions emerged along the Texas-Mexico border and in Central Texas. By May, gains were seen along the I-95 corridor in D.C., New York, and Boston, and momentum spilled over the Appalachians into the nation’s industrial heartland in June. Net increases also appeared in San Jose and San Diego that summer. Most of the nation’s major metro areas were enjoying net job gains for the first time since before the recession that fall.

As of January 2011, only a few metros, including Atlanta, Memphis, Las Vegas, Sacramento, and Albany were still experiencing net job losses. Notably, many of the remaining red bubbles are in state capitals where budget shortfalls are having a negative impact on their recovery.

Are We There Yet?
While it is encouraging to have visual evidence of our national economic recovery, this does not indicate that all jobs lost during the course of the recession have been regained. Nor does it mean that all those seeking employment can get a job. In the chart below, we see that the total number of unemployed workers remains near a record high as more than 13 million Americans are seeking work.

Chart: Total unemployed in the US (in millions), seasonally adjusted

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics (Current Population Survey)

The bad news: six million more people are seeking jobs than at the start of the recession.

Trulia looked at housing prices, foreclosure activity and job opportunities and found that it’s cheaper to buy a home than to rent in 74% of America’s 50 largest cities. The interactive data visualization also allows you to sort the data by different metrics and to see trends throughout the year. Scroll over each point to learn more about the housing market in each city. Click on the image to access the interactive chart.

via Trulia

In spite of the U.S. Census data for the past decade showing continued job de-centralization, there is now much anecdotal evidence for the just the opposite. The Chicago Crain’s Business Journal reports that companies such as Allstate, Motorola, AT&T, GE Capital, and even Sears are re-considering their fringe suburban locations, generally in stand alone campuses, and may head back to downtown Chicago. The irony of Sears possibly moving back to downtown could not be greater, having abandoned the country’s tallest building for an equally huge, though horizontal, building 45 miles from the Loop over 20 years ago.

The New York Times has been reporting this week that UBS, the huge Swiss banking firm, is considering moving their U.S. headquarters back into New York City, possibly to the next World Trade Center building, from Stamford, Connecticut. Even downtown Detroit, the basket case of American downtowns, has seen four major corporate arrivals in recent years … most recently the headquarters of the parent company of Quicken Loans.

The reason in nearly every case? The millennial generation is demanding it. Highly-educated young workers, the life’s blood of many industries, have been flocking to center cities in recent years. Trying to recruit this talent to Stamford, Conn., or Hoffman Estates, Ill. is exceedingly difficult. They are voting with their feet for a hip, high-density walkable lifestyle and a reverse commute to the ‘burbs is not in the cards for most of them.

The companies moved out to the suburbs to attract their baby boomer parents, raising their kids in suburban isolation. The millenials are doing what many generations have done in the past; they have rejected how they were raised. This once again shows that building a high quality residential base will lead to the attraction of jobs…only this time it is back to the future.

via Brookings
Christopher B. Leinberger, Visiting Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program

Joshua Lutz for The Wall Street Journal. SCENES FROM Montclair, N.J.: The view from a rooftop.

Smart ‘edge cities’ are turning their shuttered malls and aging office parks into hip hotspots.
In Lakewood, Colo., a long-shuttered mall is being rebuilt into a 22-block area with parks, bus lines, stores and 1,300 new households. Tysons Corner, Va., is undergoing a full transformation from an office park to a walkable, livable community. And officials in Ferndale, Mich., are promoting the arts scene and building affordable housing in an attempt to revitalize the small city outside Detroit. Remaking America’s sprawling suburbs, with their enormous footprints, shoddy construction, hastily built infrastructure and dying malls, is shaping up to be the biggest urban revitalization challenge of modern times—far larger in scale, scope and cost than the revitalization of our inner cities.


Just a couple of decades ago, the suburbs were the very image of the American Dream, with their sprawling, large-lot homes and expansive lawns. Suburban malls, industrial parks and office campuses accounted for a growing percentage of the nation’s economic output. Planners talked about “edge cities”—satellite centers where people could live, work and shop without ever having to set foot in major cities.


With millions of American homes now “underwater” or in foreclosure, the suburbs and exurbs have taken some of the most visible hits from the great recession. In a stunning reversal, big cities like Boston, Chicago and San Francisco have become talent magnets, drawing ambitious people, empty-nesters, young families and even a growing number of offices back to their downtown cores. As inner-city neighborhoods gentrify, blight and intransigent poverty are moving out to the suburbs. A Brookings Institution study released this week found that the number of poor people in the suburbs has grown by 37.4% since 2000, compared with 16.7% in cities.


The suburbs that have continued to prosper during the downturn share many attributes with the best urban neighborhoods: walkability, vibrant street life, density and diversity. The clustering of people and firms is a basic engine of modern economic life. When interesting people encounter each other, they spark new ideas and accelerate the formation of new enterprises. Renewing the suburbs will require retrofitting them for these new ways of living and working.


Even before the recession, our changing demography had begun to alter the texture of suburban life in favor of denser, more walkable mixed-use communities. The average age of marriage has been rising, households have gotten smaller, and home-buyers—surprising numbers of them single women—are looking for smaller houses closer in, with access to parks and cultural amenities.


Though most suburbanites are happy with where they live, many are unhappy with how much time they have to spend in their cars. A 2002 study found that more than half of Americans would prefer to walk more and drive less. Commuting by car is time-consuming and expensive, and according to research by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, it is also one of life’s least enjoyable activities. Most suburbanites don’t want to move to the city; they want the best aspects of city life to come to them.


Walkable suburbs are some of America’s best places to live, and they provide their sprawling, spread-out siblings with a model for renewal. Relatively dense commercial districts, with shops, restaurants and movie theaters, as well as a wide variety of housing types, have always been a feature of the older suburbs that grew up along the streetcar lines of big metro areas. A 2007 study by Christopher Leinberger found more than 150 walkable towns in America’s 30 largest metro regions—places like Hoboken, Montclair and Princeton, N.J.; Stamford and Greenwich, Conn.; Brookline, Mass.; Bryn Mawr, Pa.; and Royal Oak and Birmingham, Mich. Newer versions of walkable suburbs can be found in regions that developed later, like Palo Alto, Calif.; Boulder, Colo.; Coral Gables, Fla.; Decatur, Ga.; and Clayton, Mo.


These are the places where Americans are clamoring to live and where housing prices have held up even in the face of one of the greatest real-estate collapses in modern memory. More than that, as my colleague Charlotta Mellander and I found when we looked into the statistics, the U.S. metro areas with walkable suburbs have greater economic output and higher incomes, more highly educated people, and more high-tech industries, to say nothing of higher levels of happiness.


Of course, not all of America’s suburbs have the option of developing compact cores along streetcar lines or transit, and not all are filled with wonderful old housing stock that is ripe for upgrading. Many are relatively characterless places, with spread-out working class populations living in cookie-cutter houses on large lots and commuting long distances to work. These suburbs have to rebuild from the bottom up.


Languishing older malls are a good place to start. In Phoenix, three abandoned strip malls clustered around one corner have been converted into a restaurant, an upscale grocery, a chic bakery and a cocktail bar. It’s called La Grande Orange, and it has become a huge attraction, for both customers and local home-buyers. National Harbor, a mix of hotels, residential units, marinas, parks, stores and indoor and outdoor entertainment venues, is being built on the footings of two previous failed projects in Prince George’s County, Md. When completed, it will extend along a mile and a quarter of the Potomac. Outside Minneapolis, the parking lot that surrounded a dead shopping center built on landfill was turned back into wetlands—which in turn attracted new “lakefront” townhome development.


Perhaps the biggest retrofit of all is happening in Tysons Corner, Va., the virtual archetype of an auto-dependent, sprawling edge city. Located near the junctions of three major highways, it boasts 25 million square feet of office space and four million square feet of retail space. Decades ago developers hailed it as the wave of the future—one of hundreds of new satellite centers that would render our old downtown commercial centers obsolete. But Tysons Corner has lately been losing out. Its perpetual traffic gridlock and its lack of human energy have caused home-buyers to choose other places. Some companies that were headquartered there have even moved back into the District of Columbia.


Now developers and landowners are seeking to make it more walkable, with a more integrated mix of uses. In June, the county’s Board of Supervisors adopted a comprehensive plan that would transform Tysons Corner into a “24-hour urban center where people live, work and play.” Its hallmarks will be green construction, access to public transportation and abundant public amenities, like parks and bicycle trails—something that sounds very much like a real city.


There are countless other opportunities for reclamation, all across America, as Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson document in their 2008 book, “Retrofitting Suburbia.” Under-used golf courses can be transformed into parks and nature sanctuaries; abandoned car dealerships can be landscaped and developed as new, mixed-use neighborhoods. Developers can cut streets through formerly walled-off corporate campuses and add restaurants, stores and public spaces.


Historically, America’s economic growth has hinged on its ability to create new development patterns—economic landscapes that simultaneously expand space and intensify our use of it. The rebound after the panic and long depression of 1873 was based on the transition to an urban-industrial economy organized around great cities and their early streetcar suburbs. Our recovery from the Great Depression saw the rise of massive metropolitan complexes of cities and suburbs. Today the challenge is to remake our suburbs, to turn them into more vibrant, livable, people-friendly communities and, in doing so, to make them engines of innovation and productivity.


By Richard Florida
Via The Wall Street Journal
—Richard Florida is director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and the author of “The Rise of the Creative Class” and “The Great Reset.”

Trulia’s Home Offer Report is a a remarkable map — it shows the result of negotiation between homebuyers and sellers. The reveal shows how strong or weak the real-estate market is in every zip code of the country.

The three key metrics:

1) How long a house typically goes before the owner cuts the price;
2) The size of that price reduction;
3) The likelihood that there will be another reduction in price

Click on the image to see the interactive map:

via

Room for Debate in the New York Times recently posed the question: Places like Detroit are steadily losing people. Can empty urban lands be brought back to life?

A number of experts to weighed-in on this urban planning question. I’ve summarized each contributor’s response here, but also recommend reading the full text of their responses for a more nuanced understanding of their viewpoints.


Promoting Ungrowth
Jennifer Bradley is a fellow with the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program. Her work focuses on land use and economic development in Great Lakes metropolitan areas.
—Bradey argues that there are many of potential uses for vacant and abandoned land: urban agriculture; watershed restoration; park networks, public arts zones, etc.
—She argues that growth as a goal is an outdated mindset: “The nation now needs a parallel commitment to physical ungrowth. Ungrowth is not surrender but a phase of urban evolution.”
—Remaking cities is cost-intensive, and not supported by the market. Foundations don’t have sufficient funds to make up the difference.
—Bradley proposes that cities be able to reallocate money they already receive from the federal government for ‘unbuilding’ programs. “The federal government spends $104 billion a year subsidizing home-building through the mortgage interest deduction. What if it took 10 percent, or even 1 percent, of that money to help places unbuild and reinvent?”


How not to ‘Save’ a City
Richard Florida is director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. He is the author of “The Rise of the Creative Class” and “The Great Reset.”
—Florida notes that few ‘planned shrinkage’ and ‘benign neglect’ efforts have been successful in the past.
—The challenge is keeping the fabric of the community intact and ensuring that re-development and/or revitalization really do occur. “How do we guarantee that the notion of shrinking cities does not become cover for private developers looking to assemble massive parcels of centrally located and well-connected urban land on the cheap?”
—Florida points to successful bottom-up, organic renewal schemes, such as New York’s Greenwich Village and Boston’s North End to Columbus’s German Village as positive examples.
—Residents and local community organizations should spearhead revitalization.


No City is Disposable
Toni L. Griffin is an adjunct associate professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and an urban planner and designer.
—Griffin is surprised by reactions to the Census figures regarding Detroit’s 25% decrease in population: “Are we really willing to allow one of the core centers of the Great Lakes Region and the birthplace of the middle class to slip into the abyss?”
—He reaffirms the value of the city as “engines of the economic, civic and cultural life of a region.”
—Griffin points to “the failure of urban policies that have allowed regional sprawl to decentralize the urban core, leaving behind crumbling and excessive infrastructure, concentrations of generational poverty and weakened civic capacity.”
—He proposes strategies for (1) reversing the trend towards sprawl and (2) exploring non-traditional strategies for how extra land can be transformed into more productive uses.


An Age-Old Problem
Sam Staley is the director of urban and land use policy at Reason Foundation and the co-author of “Mobility First: A New Vision for Transportation in a Globally Competitive 21st Century.”
—Urban decline is not a new phenomenon.
—Failure to find a solution is sobering; “No city has yet found the silver bullet to bring them back on a broad scale. We haven’t even found a magazine of conventional bullets that can be fired in a way to bring most of these cities back.”
—Staley recommends a people-based approach to revitalization (rather than bricks-and-mortar); a “policy framework that focuses on rebuilding people-based competitive advantages in an economy that is highly mobile, global in scale and footloose.”
—Declining cities should: “ensure their neighborhoods are safe, cut the costs of doing (and opening) businesses, ensure access to quality elementary and secondary education, provide transparency in government spending and programs and maximize the value of their existing physical infrastructure.”


Ways to Reuse Vacant Lots
Michael A.Pagano is the dean of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is co-author of “Terra Incognita: Vacant Land and Urban Strategies” and co-editor of Urban Affairs Review.
—Pagano offers a series of suggestions for land re-use projects, including: gardens; side yards; outdoor art; and park-lets.
—He also suggests ways to re-structure the the tax system. “Cities should reconsider their tax structure to provide incentives for property owners (as well as city officials) to maintain their buildings and improve their vacant land.” Specifically, he recommends a land tax with a “use” imperative and imposing new fees that will keep vacant spaces clean and secure.


An Un-American Idea
Terry Schwarz is the director of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative.
—Schwarz points out that, while some cities are shrinking, the U.S. population overall is growing.
—”Growth management practices are sometimes implemented at the local or regional level, but we urgently need to plan growth at the national scale to respond to emerging challenges of climate change, rising energy costs and water scarcity. Repopulating shrinking cities must be part of the equation.”
—She suggests retrofitting old cities and re-use older urban infrastructure, and treating places like Detroit as “laboratories for understanding and restoring urban ecosystems.”


The Paradox of Greater Cleveland
Brad Whitehead is president of the Fund for Our Economic Future, a philanthropic network in northeast Ohio.
—Whitehead points out the trend toward growing regions surrounding shrinking cities:
“Take the case of northeast Ohio. According to the latest census, each of our major cities lost significant population over the last decade: Cleveland 17 percent, Akron 8 percent, Youngstown 18 percent. Yet the region’s population overall grew slightly over this period — and surprising to many — the economy outperformed the nation’s on many measures during the Great Recession.”
—Cities aren’t necessarily shrinking, they are spreading out.
—”When the regional population grows 1 percent but developed land increases 60 percent over a few decades, big problems result. Hollowed-out core cities are only the most visibly painful manifestation.”
—Whitehead blames government structures that pit neighboring communities against one another through incentives.
—He suggests “regional tax policies that discourage “beggar thy neighbor” municipal financing strategies and land use policies that more closely align infrastructure to economic and population growth should be at the top of any governor’s, county executive’s or mayor’s list.”


What About the Suburbs?
Ellen Dunham-Jones is a professor in the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. June Williamson is an associate professor at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York. They are co-authors of “Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs.”
—Shrinking cities are not a new phenomenon in history: “What’s perhaps more remarkable today are shrinking suburbs — and the specter of the end of cheap oil.”
—Failed strip malls and “zombie” subdivisions across the country are examples of extreme sprawl and demonstrate our collective dependence on cars.
—The authors suggest: “Transit-served properties could be targeted for redevelopment into mixed-use, walkable nodes and corridors, as near Northgate Mall in Seattle and along Columbia Pike in northern Virginia. More modest revitalization can occur through the re-inhabitation of former strip malls with libraries, schools and other community-serving uses like the Jackson Medical Mall in Jackson, Miss.”
—”Incentives for filling in and re-using urban land must be balanced with more robust disincentives to urbanize additional land at the fringes. First steps include revising local zoning and subdivision regulations and conducting greyfield audits of underused parking lots and vacant land.”