The economically turbulent 2000s, a decade marked by two recessions and sluggish growth, left almost no major metropolitan area unscathed including metro Atlanta. After job gains earlier in the decade, the post-recession period between 2007 and 2010 saw this area shed more than 200,000 jobs. The unemployment rate more than doubled.
Today, though recovery has yet to bring back all the lost jobs, regional employment is once again growing. But it’s not just the growth or decline of employment that affects the long-term economic health of an area. Where jobs locate matters. The geography of employment intersects with a range of issues — transportation, land use, workforce development and regional innovation — that help determine the extent metro areas are developing in productive, sustainable and inclusive ways.
Like almost every other major metro area, Atlanta-area jobs shifted from the urban core during the 2000s. Employment grew outward, adding jobs more than 10 miles away from downtown while shedding employment in close-in places. Widespread job losses following the Great Recession stalled the outward shift of employment, partly because of the heavy toll the downturn took on more suburbanized industries like construction, manufacturing and retailing, which drove steeper job losses beyond10 miles from downtown.
Still, during the 2000s, the share of greater Atlanta’s jobs in the urban core and between 3 and 10 miles of downtown declined by 0.4 and 3.8 percentage points, respectively, while the share of jobs more than 10 miles from downtown grew by 4.2 percentage points, double the average rate of increase for the nation’s largest metro areas.
By decade’s end, 64 percent of metro Atlanta’s jobs were more than 10 miles from downtown, a figure well above major metro average of 43 percent and surpassed only by metropolitan Chicago’s 67 percent and Detroit’s 77 percent. At the same time, Atlanta located fewer than 1 in 10 jobs in the urban core, compared to a metro average of 23 percent. Only Detroit posted a smaller share (7 percent) of jobs within three miles of downtown.
The shift of jobs outward and away from the urban core can create a host of regional challenges. It can mean a strain on infrastructure, more cars on the road, longer commutes and higher transportation costs. And it can make it harder for low-income residents to reach employment opportunities elsewhere. Research at the Brookings Institute has found that, though 88 percent of the region’s poor lives in suburbs, less than a third of suburban residents have access to transit; those who do can reach only 17 percent of the region’s jobs in a 90-minute commute.
A region can grow outward in smart ways — encouraging dense and mixed-use development in both the urban core and in suburbs, and linking up planning around jobs, housing, transportation and land use. Without policy action to encourage a different course, renewed job growth will likely bring a return to “job sprawl” as usual.
Elizabeth Kneebone is a fellow at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program.
