Authors

Alan Berube

Senior Fellow and Deputy Director - Metropolitan Policy Program

berubea1

Cecile Murray

Research Assistant - Metropolitan Policy Program

cecile_m_murray

In May 2017, the U.S. unemployment rate dipped to 4.3 percent. That rate varied considerably across the nation’s 388 metropolitan areas, from a low of 1.7 percent in Ames, Iowa to a high of 19.2 percent in El Centro, Calif. (those figures are for April 2017, the latest data available).

The last two times the national unemployment rate was that low were in the late 1990s, and just before the Great Recession in 2007. Compared to those two business cycles, metro areas today are actually more similar in their unemployment rates (see maps 1-3).

• In April 2017, when the U.S. unemployment rate was 4.4 percent, 226 of 388 metro areas had unemployment rates within one percentage point of that benchmark. 100 metro areas had rates below 3.4 percent, and 62 had rates exceeding 5.4 percent.
• In April 2007, when the U.S. unemployment rate was 4.5 percent, slightly fewer (217) metro areas had rates around the national average.
• But in April 1998, when the U.S. unemployment rate was 4.3 percent, only 153 metro areas had rates within one percentage point of that figure. Many more (159) had rates well below the national average, and several more (76) had rates well above the national average.

The maps point to different sources of this long-run convergence. Many places in the western and southwestern United States transitioned during this time from smaller, resource-based, high-unemployment economies to larger, industrialized, moderate-unemployment economies. Metro areas in the Northwest, inland California, and the southwestern border in Texas and Arizona that once battled sustained levels of high unemployment fit that profile. At the same time, many college towns that boasted very low unemployment in the late 1990s (think Raleigh-Durham, N.C., Lexington, Ky., Champaign-Urbana, Ill., and Ithaca, N.Y.) also matured in ways that made them more “average” economically. Unemployment is also somewhat higher today in manufacturing-focused metro areas that boomed in the 1990s, but lost much of that industry in the 2000s, places like Detroit, Mich., Peoria, Ill., and Dothan, Ala.

Although the distribution of unemployment rates across metro areas today is roughly similar to what it was 10 years ago, the geographic patterns of unemployment have shifted (see map 4).

Most strikingly, metro areas across the industrial Midwest—in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin—have unemployment rates today at least one percentage point lower than in April 2007. In the Milwaukee metro area, the unemployment rate stands at 3.2 percent today, versus 5.3 percent in April 2007. In the Battle Creek, Mich. metro area, it is 3.6 percent, down from 6.8 percent a decade ago. And in the Fort Wayne, Ind., metro area, the unemployment rate has fallen to 2.5 percent, well below its 4.5 percent level in April 2007.

Other areas of the country, including northern California, Oregon, Colorado, Minnesota, Arkansas, and South Carolina also boast lower unemployment rates today than at a similar point in the last business cycle. By contrast, in much of the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, Southeast, and Interior West, larger shares of adults are looking for work than a decade ago. Notably, unemployment rates are elevated in many Pennsylvania metro areas relative to their Midwestern brethren.

To be sure, the unemployment rate is an imperfect indicator that fails to capture other concerning trends, such as people dropping out of the labor force altogether, or long-run stagnation in wages. These sorts of phenomena can be tracked locally (see here and here for examples), but typically with a much greater time lag and less precision.

Yet these metropolitan unemployment patterns—of increasing regional convergence over the last two decades, and improved conditions in the industrial Midwest over the last decade—don’t square neatly with the political narratives of places being left behind, especially in the Rust Belt. Since most Americans—83 percent of us—live in one of these metro areas, these trends suggest the value of looking more carefully at the hidden strengths and growing similarities of our local labor markets.

      

 

 

On April 27, the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence (21CSI) and the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings hosted a discussion on city fragility and resilience. John de Boer, managing director of the SecDev Group, presented a new data visualization that tracks a wide range of risks facing over 2,100 cities; Alan Berube, senior fellow and deputy director of Brookings’s Metropolitan Policy Program, provided a macroeconomic perspective of how cities can build resilience and prosperity; and Michael O’Hanlon, co-director of 21CSI, presented his recent study of how to secure cities in the 21st century. Marek Gootman, fellow and director of strategic partnerships and global engagements in the Metropolitan Policy Program, moderated the discussion.

      

 

 

While disparate, these projects agree that inclusive growth occurs when all segments of society share in the benefits of economic growth. And they recognize that recent failures to achieve inclusive growth, especially in advanced economies like Europe and the United States, helps to explain the political and societal divisions they increasingly face.

In these societies, cities and urban regions must play a central role in promoting inclusive growth, because they represent powerful and distinctive regional economies across which the character of growth differs. Their importance, in turn, motivates our Metro Monitor report, which defines and measures inclusive economic growth across the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. It tracks metropolitan progress in the areas of overall growth (size of the economy), prosperity (productivity and standards of living), and inclusion (broad-based opportunity and narrowed economic disparity). By our definition, inclusive growth occurs when a metropolitan area makes consistent progress across all three of these domains.

Widespread growth, but limited inclusive growth

The Metro Monitor reveals that inclusive economic growth and prosperity proved elusive for most of the nation’s large metropolitan areas in recent years. All of the nation’s 100 largest metro areas added jobs and output from 2010 to 2015. Sixty-three (63) large metro areas grew by adding jobs at young firms—a sign of a healthy entrepreneurial economy. Of these 63 metro areas, 30 grew by becoming more prosperous: increasing their productivity, average wages, and standard of living. This list of 30 metro areas includes several already-wealthy tech and professional services-fueled economies, such as Austin, Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, and San Francisco. But it also includes a number of “crossroad” and “maker” economies, places like Birmingham, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, Detroit, Louisville, Nashville, and San Antonio, that specialize in goods movement and/or serve as hubs for advanced manufacturing.

However, few of these places achieved inclusive growth. Measured one way—by improving the employment rate, median earnings, and relative poverty—only 11 of the 30 metro areas achieved inclusive economic outcomes: Albany, Austin, Charleston, Columbus, Dayton, Denver, Oklahoma City, Omaha, San Antonio, Tulsa, and Worcester. Similarly, only eight (8) of those 30 metro areas managed to improve inclusive economic outcomes for both whites and people of color: Albany, Austin, Charleston, Denver, Des Moines, Houston, Milwaukee, and San Francisco. The upshot, however, is that from 2010 to 2015, four (4) of the nation’s 100 largest metro areas (Albany, Austin, Charleston, Denver) achieved growth, prosperity, and inclusion that benefited a majority of workers of all races and ethnicities.

What’s behind inclusive growth

The metro areas that did manage to achieve inclusive growth of some kind shared a few common traits around recent job growth. In general, they:

• Tended to add jobs in high-skilled traded sectors like advanced business and professional services, information, and manufacturing at a rate faster than the nation
• Tended to add jobs in lower-paid types of work within those traded sectors; the traded sectors cited above typically grew less productive and/or saw their average wages decline, suggesting hiring was skewed in favor of middle- or low-skilled workers
• Balanced “traded-sector” job growth with growth of good-paying jobs for middle-skilled workers in non-traded sectors like construction, logistics, and health care
• Relied on traded and secondary sectors to fuel modest growth of typically local-serving sectors like hospitality and retail that don’t pay well, but expand employment opportunities for less-skilled workers

These patterns indicate a “high-road” economic development strategy that prioritizes both high-skilled, innovative sectors like technology and middle-skill traded sectors like manufacturing and logistics can facilitate inclusive growth. This balance may not be easy, as the number of places that accomplished it suggests. But the strategy also takes patience. The lower-skilled, lower-paid jobs generated in hospitality and retail were the last to return during this period of the recovery from the Great Recession, while better paid sectors rebounded more quickly. Often, it was only after hiring in low-paid sectors accelerated that real improvements on inclusion outcomes materialized. So metropolitan areas that continue to follow this path may join the list of economies achieving inclusive growth in the near future.

To be sure, places that achieved inclusive growth were not always the strongest performers on the measures that the Metro Monitor tracks. In contrast to high fliers like Denver and Austin, Albany performed below the metropolitan average in most indicators of growth, prosperity, and inclusion. Yet it still managed to make consistent progress from its baseline, suggesting that a metro area’s economic starting point does not preclude it from achieving near-term inclusive economic growth.

From the margins to the mainstream

To date, the concept of inclusive growth has arguably occupied think-tankers and other researchers more so than the public and private sector leaders whose actions could ultimately help realize that vision. The Metro Monitor suggests that real progress toward inclusive growth requires an informed and intentional approach, one that leverages metropolitan assets around innovation and trade to support sectors that can provide meaningful opportunities for the greatest number of workers. Moving inclusive growth from the margins to the mainstream will require widespread recognition of the economic and political imperatives, identification of concrete measures to define goals and progress, and adoption of specific policies and practices. Cities and regions are, perhaps more than ever, critical proving grounds for those efforts.

      

 

 

Related Content:

Sanctuary cities and Trump’s executive order

Homeland security memos on immigration enforcement

On the new immigration executive order 

Subscribe to Brookings podcasts here or on iTunes, send feedback email to bcp@brookings.edu, and follow us and tweet us at @policypodcasts on Twitter.

5 on 45 is part of the Brookings Podcast Network.

      

 

 

Of course, this expansion has followed the worst downturn since the Great Depression. The Hamilton Project finds that the economy is still about 700,000 jobs short of its pre-recession employment level, adjusted for new people entering the labor force during that time. Partly as a result, only 60 percent of Americans 16 years and older are employed today, down from 63 percent before the recession. Wages are growing, but only after several years of relative stagnation. Frustration with the state of the economy was a major theme in the 2016 presidential campaign, and today animates Trump administration proposals around infrastructure, immigration, and the environment.

While useful, these top-line national numbers paint an incomplete portrait of the economy in a nation as large as the United States. Our new Metro Monitor offers a deeper look in two ways: it focuses on a wider set of indicators that chart comprehensive economic progress; and it examines these dynamics in metropolitan areas, the distinctive regional hubs of the American economy. Three maps from the Metro Monitor—illustrating changes from 2010 to 2015—help tell the story of an accelerating, but as-of-yet incomplete, economic recovery.

The first map highlights where regional economies’ growth and entrepreneurship has been strongest and weakest through most of the expansion. The fastest-expanding metro areas came in three categories: places in the Southeast and Southwest that suffered the most during the housing crash and are now “reverting to the mean;” highly educated places with significant technology and science industries that have expanded in the recovery (especially the Bay Area and Pacific Northwest); and the Energy Belt in Texas and Oklahoma that was still booming in 2015, but has lost much of its momentum since. Metro areas in the industrial Northeast, Midwest, and Deep South expanded much more slowly.

The second map focuses not on which economies are growing bigger and more dynamic, but instead on the quality of their growth, which is measured by indicators like productivity and average incomes. It highlights that the latter two categories of fast growers—the educated tech/science metro areas, and those in Texas/Oklahoma—performed well on what we call “prosperity.” However, it also points to lower-quality growth in the Sunbelt metro areas, where jobs have expanded faster in lower-paying sectors. The map also points to strong productivity growth throughout most of the Midwest, reflecting in part the resurgence of a manufacturing sector that is generating ever-more output without adding large numbers of jobs.

That leads to the third map, which arguably speaks most directly to the current economic debate—are people feeling the economic momentum in terms of employment and pay? In some respects, progress was widespread: From 2010 to 2015, the share of working-age adults in jobs rose in the vast majority of metro areas. Yet only a little more than half posted significant increases in median wages, and most of that progress occurred from 2014 to 2015. On these inclusion measures, regional patterns are less strong. Some fast-growing places like Houston succeeded in drawing more people into the labor market, but those new entrants earned lower wages, adding to the amount of working poverty in the metro area. Other slow-growing regions like Buffalo nevertheless managed to expand employment and wages at the same time.

These three maps help illustrate the mixed picture that captures the country’s economic mood today. Just 14 of the 100 largest metro areas managed above-average performance in all three areas. They included some of the highly-educated tech centers—Austin, Denver, Raleigh, San Jose, and Seattle—that shone blue across the maps, but also growing and diversified mid-sized markets like Charleston, Columbus, Nashville, and Omaha. Many more metro areas—23 in all, in nearly every corner of the country—failed to beat the average in any of the three categories. Residents of these lagging metro areas may indeed feel like the recovery has yet to hit home for them.

In the end, these maps of economic growth, prosperity, and inclusion pose almost as many questions as they answer. Users can begin to explore what’s behind the numbers with the Metro Monitor 2017 Dashboard. In the coming weeks, we will publish a series of analyses that probe more deeply into the factors—from industry to population to education—that are driving these metro trends. For now, these maps help make the case for why a broader, metro-focused view of success is crucial for both diagnosing and solving our nation’s economic challenges.

      

 

 

The new DHS guidelines broaden priority populations for deportation, arguably extending to all 11 million estimated unauthorized immigrants living in the United States.

THE THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• On February 20, 2017, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published guidelines for how to implement President Trump’s executive orders on immigration.
• The guidelines greatly broaden the criteria for unauthorized immigrants eligible for deportation from the United States.
• Under President Obama, DHS focused its agency’s enforcement resources on unauthorized immigrants that were convicted of serious crimes.
• President Obama deported over two million unauthorized immigrants, more than any other U.S. president.
• The new DHS guidelines broaden priority populations for deportation, arguably extending to all 11 million estimated unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S.
• While President Trump links illegal immigrants to increased crime, evidence suggests that both illegal immigration and crime have actually been trending downward in recent years.
• Research shows that immigrants are less likely to engage in criminal activity than native-born Americans.
• The Pew Research Center estimates that more than 60 percent of unauthorized immigrants in the United States live in just 20 metropolitan areas, and unauthorized immigrants are important contributors to these urban economies.
• Unauthorized immigrants account for between 20 and 30 percent of all housecleaners, construction workers, dishwashers, and groundskeepers nationwide, and those percentages are likely much higher in big cities, where immigrant populations are concentrated.
• The new immigration measures rely on cities to step up enforcement by training and deputizing local law enforcement to serve as federal immigration agents.
• DHS has announced that it will hire 10,000 new immigration enforcement agents in the coming year to conduct raids and sweeps in big cities.
• Some cities have already refused to cooperate with the federal government on the new immigration measures, publicly labeling themselves as “sanctuary cities.”
• Immigrants that have been hoping for a legal path to citizenship are likely to go into the shadows in response to these guidelines, to the long-term detriment of the cities and communities in which they live.

THE SOURCE:

These communities have a lot at stake in Trump’s executive order on immigration

      

 

 

President Trump campaigned on cracking down on illegal immigration, so his [sanctuary city executive order] was a very explicit way for him to suggest that he was doing that.

THE THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• The term sanctuary city generally refers to local jurisdictions that in some way limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities, typically by refusing to honor detention requests from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE).
• There are dozens of publicly declared sanctuary cities in the U.S. and about 600 counties that have some degree of sanctuary status.
• In January 2017, President Trump issued an executive order that would withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities.
• President Trump campaigned on cracking down on illegal immigration, so this was a very explicit way for him to suggest that he was doing that.
• A few days after the executive order was issued, the city of San Francisco sued the Trump administration, arguing that the order represented constitutional overreach, and it’s likely that other cities will follow suit.
• Research shows that sanctuary cities are on average safer and have lower crime rates than the national average.
• The new executive order could actually make cities less safe by deterring immigrant communities from coming forward to report criminal activity for fear of deportation.
• Many sanctuary cities receive significant funding in grants from the federal government, which are used for a wide range of purposes including transportation and infrastructure, which is something the Trump administration has promised to spend more on.
• This represents something of a contradiction on the part of the Trump administration: on one hand Trump has promised to invest in places to create new jobs, but on the other hand he is threatening to hold back that same money to enforce immigration policy.

THE SOURCE:

These communities have a lot at stake in Trump’s executive order on immigration

      

 

 

METRO MONITOR

An index of inclusive economic growth in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas

As 2017 begins, the economy is, by most conventional measures, in remarkable condition. After years of slow but steady recovery following the Great Recession, the United States is currently poised to continue one of its longest economic expansions on record. The nation has added jobs and output faster than most advanced economies since the recession, the unemployment rate has fallen to near its pre-recession level, and middle-class wage growth is gaining momentum.

So why do so many Americans seem anxious about the direction of the economy? Last year’s election laid bare the frustration of millions of voters who seem to feel left behind by the quickening pace of economic change. Though the forces of trade and technological innovation continue to propel the economy forward, they have also led to tectonic shifts that make it harder for communities large and small to produce inclusive growth and prosperity that delivers economic security and opportunity for all.

Today, leaders at the national and local levels are responding to these economic and social challenges with renewed urgency. In metropolitan areas—the engines of the U.S. economy—coalitions of political, civic, and business leaders are implementing policies and strategies that support the ability of firms and industries to compete and grow in a global economy. At the same time, these leaders are investing in new strategies to ensure that growth delivers tangible results for workers, families, and communities.

The Metro Monitor aims to inform the efforts of these leaders by tracking economic progress in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas along three dimensions: growth, prosperity, and inclusion. This year’s edition of the Metro Monitor focuses on trends from 2010 to 2015, a period of hastening recovery from the Great Recession. It reveals considerable variation in how different metro areas fared. Specifically:

• Growth was widespread among large metropolitan areas from 2010 to 2015. Metro areas in Florida, California, and the Carolinas ranked among the fastest-growing job markets, as the Sunbelt made a strong comeback from the recession. Many Sunbelt metro areas also saw large increases in employment at young firms. Research- and technology-intensive advanced industries powered growth in gross metropolitan product (GMP) during this portion of the recovery, benefiting places like San Jose, Austin, Houston, Seattle, and Nashville. Post-industrial metro economies around the Great Lakes saw far more modest growth, however. These trends may indicate that large metro areas are returning to their pre-recession growth trajectories, for better and worse.

• Large metropolitan areas and the country as a whole made uneven progress on prosperity from 2010 to 2015. Productivity, or total economic output per job, rose in only 45 of the 100 largest metro areas. Productivity grew fastest in regions that specialize in research- and technology-intensive industries, but declined in metro areas where the retail and hospitality sectors drove growth. Meanwhile, average wages grew in most large metro areas from 2010 to 2015 as unemployment rates dropped. Average wage growth outpaced productivity growth in most large metro areas, including those in which productivity declined. Standards of living also rose in most large metro areas as GMP growth outpaced population growth.

• Inclusion outcomes improved in many metropolitan areas from 2010 to 2015 as hiring accelerated. However, outcomes remained below their pre-recession levels in most large metro areas. Employment rates improved in 95 metro areas as faster hiring created job opportunities for more people. Rates of relative income poverty fell in 72 large metro areas as wages in the bottom half of the income distribution improved. Median wages rose in only a little more than half of large metro areas, however, mostly because of dramatic increases from 2014 to 2015. These outcomes also varied considerably for workers with different levels of education and racial/ethnic backgrounds, both across and within metro areas.

• Only 14 of the 100 largest metropolitan areas did better than the average of their peers on growth, prosperity, and inclusion from 2010 to 2015. Knowledge- and research-intensive advanced services industries played a big role in the success of these consistently high-performing metro areas, suggesting innovation and technology can help generate inclusive growth and prosperity. A smaller number of metro areas posted modest gains in these categories despite not achieving consistent above-average performance. Meanwhile, 23 of the 100 largest metro areas performed worse than the average of their peers across growth, prosperity, and inclusion. They included places in the Northeast, Midwest, and South with slower-growing industries, and Sunbelt places hit especially hard by the housing bust of the late 2000s.

Despite improving economic conditions during the 2010 to 2015 period, most metro areas still face gaps between headline growth and bottom-line prosperity and inclusion. For many, a full recovery from the Great Recession remained out of reach. The economic trends of this period suggest that if leaders wish to sustain support for policies that support growth, those policies must incorporate deliberate efforts to ensure that more people, businesses, and communities are able to share in the benefits of economic growth and prosperity.

Download the full report

Download the executive summary

Explore the data>>

Download the press release

      

 

 

Many big-city mayors in the United States are speaking out against the executive order. Mayors in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle, among others, have issued statements and joined protests to denounce the order and to support immigrants and refugees. They recognize that many individuals affected by the order are essential parts of the diverse cities they govern. Their protests of the order coincide with a wider set of strategies that Democratic mayors seem poised to undertake to oppose the Trump administration on issues such as criminal justice and civil rights, climate change, and support for the safety net.

While it’s true that these big cities are home to large numbers of affected individuals and communities, they aren’t the only places with a significant stake in the matter. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that many places around the country—both large and small—are home to immigrant populations from the countries targeted by Trump’s executive order. Under the order, members of those immigrant communities may find it impossible—at least in the short term—to bring family to the United States, and to travel to their countries of origin and subsequently gain readmission to the United States.

At the metropolitan scale, the places with the largest numbers of foreign-born individuals from six of the named countries (Libyan-born individuals are not identified separately in the Census Bureau data) include many of the largest places overall. Los Angeles leads all others with 161,000, chiefly due to the large number of Iranians who settled there in the early 1980s in the wake of the revolution; the University of Southern California is one of the top destinations for U.S. students from Tehran. New York, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and Washington all rank among the top 10 metro areas for both total population and population from the six countries. Greater Detroit actually has the second largest number of residents from those countries, about 15,000 more than the New York metro area, which is nearly five times its size. The Detroit metro area has almost twice as many Iraq-born individuals as the second-largest metro destination (San Diego), as well as significant communities of Yemenis and Syrians. Many of those individuals have settled in the Detroit suburb of Hamtramck, which is now home to the nation’s first majority-Muslim city council. Together, the 20 metro areas with the largest number of residents from the six countries contain nearly three-quarters of all such residents across the nation’s 381 metro areas.

Metropolitan areas with the largest number of residents born in “banned countries,” 2011-2015

Note: Data for Libya, one of the seven nations affected by the order, were not available.
Source: Brookings analysis of 2011-2015 5-year American Community Survey data. Observations rounded to nearest 100.

Detroit also leads all other metropolitan areas in the share of its total population from the six countries. From 2011 to 2015, it had 15 residents from Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen per 1,000 total residents. Los Angeles and San Diego fell not far behind, with 12 residents from those countries per 1,000 total residents. But many smaller communities that have welcomed refugees from these countries for many years figure among those with the largest shares of these residents, such as Modesto, Calif., Rochester and St. Cloud, Minn.; Fargo, N.D.; Harrisonburg, Va.; Lincoln, Neb.; Iowa City, Iowa; Portland, Maine; and Ann Arbor, Mich. A few of these places are home to significant educational and medical institutions (e.g., the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, James Madison University in Harrisonburg, the University of Iowa in Iowa City, and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor) that have attracted highly-qualified faculty and students from those countries. Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul is meanwhile home to the nation’s largest community of Somali-born individuals, and the top metropolitan destination for refugee resettlement from that war-torn nation.

Metropolitan areas with the highest shares of residents from “banned countries,” 2011-2015

Note: Data for Libya, one of the seven nations affected by the order, were not available.
Source: Brookings analysis of 2011-2015 5-year American Community Survey data. Observations rounded to nearest 100.

For now, the executive order remains focused on seven Muslim-majority countries, but White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus indicated on Sunday that the ban could be expanded: “Perhaps other countries needed to be added to an executive order going forward….” Adding new countries to the list could put into the cross hairs additional communities with large shares of residents from nations such as Pakistan (Stockton and Yuba City, Calif.), Indonesia (Corvallis, Ore.), or Saudi Arabia (Pocatello, Idaho and Bowling Green, Ky.).

In that light, the spread of protests this weekend beyond the nation’s big coastal cities, to significant centers like Detroit and Minneapolis, but also Boise, Dallas, Omaha, and Phoenix, reflects a broad awareness that immigrants and refugees—from wherever they originate—add immensely to the social, economic, and cultural fabric of our country as a whole, and individual communities of all sizes and political persuasions. Their residents are right to denounce this cruel and misguided action from the Trump White House.

      

 

 

This piece does not purport to explain why people voted the way they did, or what role economic factors played in their decisions. Rather, it acknowledges that the state of the economy in small-town and rural America highlighted throughout the campaign and after the election surely deserves attention. Economists such as David Autor have chronicled how increasing Chinese imports over the past two decades produced long-term economic dislocation in many of these communities. Anne Case and Angus Deaton uncovered alarming evidence that mortality rates have risen among white Americans with lower levels of education, paralleling a rapid increase in drug overdoses largely concentrated in non-urban areas.

Central to these discussions is the availability of work in such communities, particularly for men who have borne the brunt of manufacturing job losses. Research from President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers highlighted the trends and factors underlying the decline in labor force participation among prime-aged men (ages 25–54). Earlier this year, I examined the metropolitan geography of non-working, prime-aged men, finding that smaller industrial centers in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio exhibited low rates of male employment, as did mining centers in West Virginia and Louisiana, and agricultural centers in Arkansas, Texas, and inland California.

While the focus on metropolitan areas illustrates important regional patterns relating to economic function and migration, it may obscure important differences in employment within metro areas, while also overlooking the non-metropolitan communities on which economists have focused increasing attention. By examining the full range of U.S. community types, this analysis shows that cities and smaller communities ultimately have a shared interest in improving access to employment opportunities for prime-aged workers.

To illustrate conditions and trends in work across the urban-rural continuum, I examined U.S. Census data for cities and counties according to a novel Brookings Metro classification system¹:

• 139 primary cities anchor the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas; they include the largest city in each of those metro areas, along with other cities in the metro name with populations of at least 100,000 (e.g., all three cities named in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metropolitan area).
• 81 high-density suburban counties surround or abut many of these cities; at least 95 percent of residents in these counties live in a census-defined “urbanized area” that forms the dense core of the metropolitan area; these are often referred to as “older” or “first” suburbs (e.g., Alameda, CA; New Haven, CT; Fulton, GA).
• 157 mature suburban counties represent the next era of metropolitan development, where today 75–95 percent of residents live in an urbanized area (e.g., Kendall, IL; Howard, MD; Collin, TX).
• 344 emerging suburban and exurban counties lie at the fringe of major metro areas, where fewer than 75 percent of residents live in urbanized areas (e.g., Fauquier, VA; Aiken, SC; St. Croix, WI).
• 567 small metropolitan counties comprise metropolitan areas outside the 100 largest (e.g., Muskegon, MI; St. Lucie, FL; Pueblo, CO).
• 658 micropolitan counties are part of census-defined micropolitan areas centered on smaller cities and towns with populations between 10,000 and 50,000 people (e.g., Twin Falls, ID; Clinton, NY [Plattsburgh]; Dare, NC [Kill Devil Hills]).
• 1,318 rural counties form the rest of the U.S. map, from Aroostook in northern Maine (population 72,000) to Golden Valley in central Montana (population 880).
  

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Figure 1.

Classifying the United States in this way reveals that primary cities, high-density and mature suburbs, and small metro area counties contain roughly similar numbers of residents (Figure 1). The less urbanized parts of the country contain smaller numbers of people, with rural areas accounting for the smallest share (just 6 percent of total U.S. population).

This view of the urban-rural continuum also points to three key findings regarding the geography of work (and non-work) among prime-aged men in the United States.

Rates of work among prime-aged men are below average in both cities and smaller, less urbanized communities. The latest available data, which reflect conditions between 2010 and 2014, indicate that slightly over 80 percent of all prime-aged men nationwide were working during that time.² Prevailing rates were lower, however, in both large cities and smaller, less urban communities (Figure 2). In big cities and smaller metro areas, 79 percent of prime-aged men were employed during those years. The shares dropped to 75 and 72 percent, respectively, in micropolitan and rural areas.

Figure 2.

Even among these smaller places, rates of employment among prime-aged men varied across the United States. States beyond just the Rust Belt and Appalachia exhibited low rates of work in their micropolitan and rural areas. In fact, among states with at least 50,000 residents in these types of communities, rates were lowest in Florida, Arizona, and California (Figure 3). In non-metropolitan Louisiana, South Carolina, and Georgia, too, less than two-thirds of prime-aged men were employed in the 2010–2014 period. While Kentucky and West Virginia also exhibited employment rates below 70 percent in their smaller areas, these statistics indicate that even many states with racially and ethnically diverse rural areas suffer employment challenges in such communities.

Low rates of work among prime-aged men also affect many big cities with diverse populations. Among the 139 primary cities, 18 exhibited employment rates below 70 percent for these men from 2010–2014. Interestingly, Rust Belt cities—including three in Ohio and one each in Michigan and Pennsylvania—figure most prominently among those with very low prime-aged male employment rates. Other racially segregated cities in the Northeast (Hartford, Newark, Rochester, Springfield, and Syracuse) exhibit similarly low rates of work among these men.

Figure 3.

Many non-metro communities and cities share low rates of work

Source: Brookings analysis of 2010-14 American Community Survey data
Note: States displayed had at least 50,000 micropolitan/rural residents in 2010-14

Employment rates among men fell dramatically in smaller communities, but rose in cities. Considerably lower rates of work among prime-aged men in micropolitan and rural areas reflect a long-term decline in their employment. From 2000 to 2010–2014, the share of males ages 25–54 who were employed dropped by 4.8 percentage points in micropolitan counties, and by 5.4 percentage points in rural counties (Figure 4). By contrast, employment among this group in cities rose by 2 percentage points during that time and fell only modestly in high-density suburbs. This suggests that a community’s level of urbanization was closely related to its employment outcomes for prime-aged male workers.

Figure 4.

While industrial Midwestern states did not have particularly low non-metro male employment rates in 2010–2014, many saw those rates fall significantly since 2000. Southern states—including South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee—suffered the most dramatic declines, but Michigan, Indiana, and Pennsylvania also registered drops of 6–8 percentage points in the share of their micropolitan and rural prime-aged males in work (Figure 5).

Many cities saw equivalent gains in employment rates among this group, including the largest (New York), second-largest (Los Angeles), and fourth-largest (Houston) cities in the country. Some of the changes in non-metro areas and cities may be attributable to changes in the strength of local economies and their demand for workers. At the same time, the changes may also reflect shifts in the underlying populations of those areas over time, as small communities lose more employable residents to out-migration and big cities gain them through in-migration. Notwithstanding those widespread gains, older industrial cities like Akron, Allentown, Augusta, Detroit, Syracuse, and Tacoma experienced declines in prime-aged male employment similar to those occurring in rural areas nationwide.

Figure 5.

Male employment fell dramatically in many states’ non-metro areas, while it rose dramatically in several big cities

Source: Brookings analysis of 2000 census and 2010-14 American Community Survey data
Note: States displayed had at least 50,000 micropolitan/rural residents in 2010-14

Big cities remain home to more out-of-work prime-aged men than other types of communities. As shown in Figure 2, prime-aged men in cities exhibited below-average employment rates in 2010–2014, as did those in small metro areas, micropolitan areas, and rural communities. This finding—combined with the fact that primary cities are the most populous of the seven community types analyzed here (see Figure 1)—shows that cities contain a larger number of out-of-work prime-aged men than any other community type (see Figure 6). An estimated 2.9 million non-working males ages 25–54 lived in big cities in 2010–2014. The next-largest group occupied small metro areas, followed by high-density and mature suburbs. If micropolitan and rural areas are considered together, they still contained fewer out-of-work prime-aged men than either primary cities or small metro areas.

Figure 6.

This analysis points to two key takeaways.

First, for as much as the 2016 election pitted urban versus rural interests (reflected in maps of the presidential vote), these places share an important interest in improving the availability and quality of jobs. In the wake of the election, analysis has focused on the white working class and how to alleviate the economic distress facing the smaller communities in which many of those individuals live. But just a year and a half ago, the conversation focused on urban places like Baltimore and Ferguson, where tensions between communities of color and law enforcement exposed longstanding economic frustrations. Addressing the employment challenges faced by both types of communities will take serious, long-term commitment and public policy focus untethered from the news cycle.

Second, while jobs are certainly a shared priority for cities and rural areas, their divergent trend lines in employment opportunity merit reflection. The past 10–15 years have strengthened the economic hand of many cities, as coming-of-age generations seek a more urban lifestyle, and as an increasingly services-focused U.S. economy concentrates in places with greater access to highly skilled labor, innovative institutions, and strong global connectivity. These dynamics, in turn, have raised demand for workers in such places, even for those with lower levels of formal skills, drawing them into jobs at increased rates.

Those same dynamics have simultaneously disadvantaged many small towns and rural areas. If what economists call “agglomeration” is increasingly the route to employment opportunity, can small places succeed? As my colleague Mark Muro has argued convincingly, manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back to those communities to a degree anywhere close to the number that have departed. Part of the answer may lie in strengthening connections between larger and smaller places through infrastructure investment and shared economic development strategies. Such efforts could unite economic leaders in cities and their surrounding rural areas in older industrial states, if state lawmakers choose not to pit those interests against one another. Yet if recent trends hold, efforts to bring jobs back to small-town America seem likely to face an uphill battle against market forces that have put jobs further out of reach for many of their residents.