Distinctiveness

You are where you eat.

Posted on by Joe Cortright

The Big Idea: Many metro areas vie for the title of “best food city.” But what cities have the most options for grabbing a bite to eat — and what does that say about where you live?

8463293463_559cacf5bd_m

There are plenty of competing rankings for best food cities floating around the internet. You can find lists for cities with the most restaurants, the best restaurants, the most distinctive local restaurants… and of course none of these seem to agree (although the “winners” tend to be similar among these lists).

But what about the cities that provide the most dining options per person? And what does restaurant variety have to do with a city’s livability?

One of the hallmarks of a great city is a smorgasbord of great places to eat. Cities offer a wide variety of choices of what, where, and how to eat, everything from grabbing a dollar taco to seven courses of artisanally curated locally raised products (not to mention pedigreed chickens). The “food scene” is an important component of the urban experience.

Restaurants are an important marker of the amenities that characterize attractive urban environments. Ed Glaeser and his colleagues found that “Cities with more restaurant and live performance theaters per capita have grown more quickly over the past 20 years both in the U.S. and in France.”

Matthew Holian and Matthew Kahn have seen that an increase in the number of restaurants per capita in a downtown area has a statistically significant effect in reducing driving and lowering greenhouse gas production.

We’ve assembled data on the number of full service restaurants per capita in each of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. These data are from the County Business Patterns data compiled by the US Census Bureau for 2012. Note that the “full service” definition basically applies only to sit down, table service restaurants, not the broader category that includes fast food and self-service. We’re also looking at metro-wide data to assure that the geographical units we’re comparing are defined in a similar fashion—political boundaries like city limits and county lines are arbitrary and vary widely from place to place, making them a poor basis for constructing this kind of comparison.

As you might guess, the metro areas with the most restaurants per capita are found predominantly in the Northeast and on the West Coast. Elsewhere, New Orleans and Denver score high as well. While the average metropolitan area has about seven full-service restaurants per 10,000 residents, the range is considerable. The San Francisco metropolitan area has more than 11 restaurants per 10,000, while Riverside has only five and seven other metropolitan areas have fewer than six.

The top five metropolitan areas on this indicator are San Francisco, Providence, Portland, New York, and Seattle. Each of these cities has nine or more full service restaurants per capita. With the possible exception of Providence, all of these are recognized as major food cities in the US. (And Portland achieves its high ranking without counting the city’s more than 500 licensed food carts.)

Interestingly, Las Vegas, which we think of as a tourism mecca, has fewer restaurants per capita than the average metropolitan area. A lot of this has to do with scale—the average restaurant in Las Vegas tends to be much larger than in other metropolitan areas. According to the Census Bureau, almost eight percent of Las Vegas restaurants employed more than 100 workers; nationally the average is only two percent.

This ranking doesn’t include anything about quality–simply quantity– but the higher restaurants per capita can indicate higher competition (and therefore better quality options), or higher demand (a signal that more diversity of options is valued, allowing for more valuable experiences). It is also highly correlated with per capita income, which makes sense: the more people that are able to afford frequent restaurant outings, the more restaurants there will be.

While this isn’t a perfect listing of best food culture — each person’s measure of the ‘best food town’ is subjective — it does settle the debate of where you should go to have the largest selection of eatery options. If you’re going to travel 2,000 miles for dinner, it might be wise to make a reservation. Or if you’re going to Portland, at least be ready to wait in line.

 

Photo courtesy of Janet at Flickr Creative Commons

Best Bar Cities

Posted on by CityObservatory Guest

Great public spaces make great cities. But so do great private spaces. They provide opportunities for people to socialize, and provide the character that make a city more livable and unique. We have already talked about how restaurants add value to a city– but thought we’d look at bars in the same way.

Now, what makes a great bar depends on who you talk to- but regardless of if you prefer a wine bar with small plates, a gastropub, or a dive bar with ski ball (or without ski ball)—bars contribute to a city’s livability and an individual’s experience within a city. Trying to argue that one is better than another is, well, a way to start a barroom brawl. So while we can’t resolve which cities have the best bars, we can at least count which cities have the most bars.

We used County Business Patterns data to analyze the number of bars per 10,000 workers each the top 51 most populous metro areas. (The latest data is from 2012, reflected below):

It’s no surprise that New Orleans comes up first—it is renowned for its bars. (In case it wasn’t on your calendar, Mardis Gras is right around the corner..) There’s no particular rhyme or reason for the rest of the ranking; a variety of things can influence bar culture, such as policy and availability of licenses, availability and strength of public transit, age of residents (younger residents will desire more bars than older ones), and weather (colder places have seen higher consumption rates of alcohol).

Of course, the number of bars per capita isn’t a measure of quality (much like it isn’t for restaurants, either). More bars may reflect loose regulations, a higher city-wide per capita income, and of course, a desire for variety. For example, Pittsburgh’s historical blue-collar workforce may desire its older dive bars, but its new population of young engineers and medical workers allow for hip and more expensive wine, whiskey, and champagne bars to flourish.

Bars are just one way in which a city can make itself more livable for its residents. Livability is important—it attracts residents, and therefore tax payers, and helps to retain younger, talented workers. Ed Glaeser, Harvard economist and author, has encouraged the city of Boston in its efforts to allow bars to stay open later. He sees it as a matter of making Boston “livelier.” A city’s liveliness, to which bars certainly contribute, may not be of the utmost importance to all residents—but it’s clear it’s important to some, and can be a strategic advantage to cities. (To read more about how city distinctiveness and its placemaking efforts can benefit cities, go here and here.)

Consuming the city: Ranking restaurants per capita

Posted on by Joe Cortright

The number of eating places per capita is a key measure of a city’s livability

Cities are great places for consumers.  They provide an abundance and variety of choices, especially in the form of experiences. While our conventional economic indicators don’t fully capture the nature and depth of choices in cities, there are some measures that shed light on which places offer the most.  Today we offer our index of restaurants per capita as one such indicator of where choice is greatest.

There are plenty of competing rankings for best food cities floating around the internet. You can find lists for cities with the most restaurants, the best restaurants, the most distinctive local restaurants… and of course none of these seem to agree (although the “winners” tend to be similar among these lists).

But what about the cities that provide the most dining options per person? And what does restaurant variety have to do with a city’s livability?

One of the hallmarks of a great city is a smorgasbord of great places to eat. Cities offer a wide variety of choices of what, where, and how to eat, everything from grabbing a dollar taco to seven courses of artisanally curated locally raised products (not to mention pedigreed chickens). The “food scene” is an important component of the urban experience.

Restaurants are an important marker of the amenities that characterize attractive urban environments. Ed Glaeser and his colleagues found that “Cities with more restaurant and live performance theaters per capita have grown more quickly over the past 20 years both in the U.S. and in France.”

Matthew Holian and Matthew Kahn have seen that an increase in the number of restaurants per capita in a downtown area has a statistically significant effect in reducing driving and lowering greenhouse gas production. We’ve assembled data on the number of restaurants per capita in each of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. These data are from the County Business Patterns data compiled by the US Census Bureau for 2012. Note that this category, technically NAICS 72251, includes both sit down, table service restaurants and simpler fast food and self-service self-service establishments. We’re also looking at metro-wide data to assure that the geographical units we’re comparing are defined in a similar fashion—political boundaries like city limits and county lines are arbitrary and vary widely from place to place, making them a poor basis for constructing this kind of comparison.

As you might guess, the metro areas with the most restaurants per capita are found predominantly in the Northeast and on the West Coast. Elsewhere, New Orleans scores high as well. While the average metropolitan area has about 17 restaurants per 10,000 residents, the range is considerable. The San Francisco metropolitan area has more than 23 restaurants per 10,000, while Riverside and Grand Rapids have only about 14 per 10,000. (On this map areas shaded green have the highest number of restaurants per capita; areas shaded red have the fewest. Detailed data on individual metropolitan areas is shown in the table below).

The top six metropolitan areas on this indicator are San Francisco, New York, Providence, Boston, Seattle and Portland. Each of these cities has twenty or more  restaurants per 10,000 population. With the possible exception of Providence, all of these are recognized as major food cities in the US. (And Portland achieves its high ranking without counting the city’s more than 500 licensed food carts.)

In an important sense, the number of different restaurants in an area correlates to the range choices available to consumers. Cities that have more restaurants per capita tend to have larger restaurants (measured by the average number of employees per restaurant).  Interestingly, Las Vegas, which we think of as a tourism mecca, has fewer restaurants per capita than the average metropolitan area. A lot of this has to do with scale—the average restaurant in Las Vegas tends to be much larger than in other metropolitan areas.

This ranking doesn’t include anything about quality–simply quantity–but the higher restaurants per capita can indicate higher competition (and therefore better quality options), or higher demand (a signal that more diversity of options is valued, allowing for more valuable experiences).

While this isn’t a perfect listing of best food culture — each person’s measure of the ‘best food town’ is subjective — it does settle the debate of where you should go to have the largest selection of eatery options.

 

You are where you eat.

Posted on by Joe Cortright

The Big Idea: Many metro areas vie for the title of “best food city.” But what cities have the most options for grabbing a bite to eat — and what does that say about where you live?

8463293463_559cacf5bd_m

There are plenty of competing rankings for best food cities floating around the internet. You can find lists for cities with the most restaurants, the best restaurants, the most distinctive local restaurants… and of course none of these seem to agree (although the “winners” tend to be similar among these lists).

But what about the cities that provide the most dining options per person? And what does restaurant variety have to do with a city’s livability?

One of the hallmarks of a great city is a smorgasbord of great places to eat. Cities offer a wide variety of choices of what, where, and how to eat, everything from grabbing a dollar taco to seven courses of artisanally curated locally raised products (not to mention pedigreed chickens). The “food scene” is an important component of the urban experience.

Restaurants are an important marker of the amenities that characterize attractive urban environments. Ed Glaeser and his colleagues found that “Cities with more restaurant and live performance theaters per capita have grown more quickly over the past 20 years both in the U.S. and in France.”

Matthew Holian and Matthew Kahn have seen that an increase in the number of restaurants per capita in a downtown area has a statistically significant effect in reducing driving and lowering greenhouse gas production.

We’ve assembled data on the number of full service restaurants per capita in each of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. These data are from the County Business Patterns data compiled by the US Census Bureau for 2012. Note that the “full service” definition basically applies only to sit down, table service restaurants, not the broader category that includes fast food and self-service. We’re also looking at metro-wide data to assure that the geographical units we’re comparing are defined in a similar fashion—political boundaries like city limits and county lines are arbitrary and vary widely from place to place, making them a poor basis for constructing this kind of comparison.

As you might guess, the metro areas with the most restaurants per capita are found predominantly in the Northeast and on the West Coast. Elsewhere, New Orleans and Denver score high as well. While the average metropolitan area has about seven full-service restaurants per 10,000 residents, the range is considerable. The San Francisco metropolitan area has more than 11 restaurants per 10,000, while Riverside has only five and seven other metropolitan areas have fewer than six.

The top five metropolitan areas on this indicator are San Francisco, Providence, Portland, New York, and Seattle. Each of these cities has nine or more full service restaurants per capita. With the possible exception of Providence, all of these are recognized as major food cities in the US. (And Portland achieves its high ranking without counting the city’s more than 500 licensed food carts.)

Interestingly, Las Vegas, which we think of as a tourism mecca, has fewer restaurants per capita than the average metropolitan area. A lot of this has to do with scale—the average restaurant in Las Vegas tends to be much larger than in other metropolitan areas. According to the Census Bureau, almost eight percent of Las Vegas restaurants employed more than 100 workers; nationally the average is only two percent.

This ranking doesn’t include anything about quality–simply quantity– but the higher restaurants per capita can indicate higher competition (and therefore better quality options), or higher demand (a signal that more diversity of options is valued, allowing for more valuable experiences). It is also highly correlated with per capita income, which makes sense: the more people that are able to afford frequent restaurant outings, the more restaurants there will be.

While this isn’t a perfect listing of best food culture — each person’s measure of the ‘best food town’ is subjective — it does settle the debate of where you should go to have the largest selection of eatery options. If you’re going to travel 2,000 miles for dinner, it might be wise to make a reservation. Or if you’re going to Portland, at least be ready to wait in line.

 

Photo courtesy of Janet at Flickr Creative Commons

How productive is your city?

Posted on by Joe Cortright

Which metropolitan economies are the most productive?  Our broadest measure of economic output is gross domestic product — the total value of goods and services produced by our economy.  Economists usually compare the productivity of national economies by looking at GDP per worker or per employee.  At the sub-national level, the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates an analogous concept “Gross Metropolitan Product” –the total value of goods and services produced in a metropolitan area.

If we divide metropolitan GDP by population, we get a rough idea of which metropolitan economies are the most productive on a per person basis.  Nationally, gross metropolitan product averages about $55,000 per person in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas.

The distribution is characterized by two distinct outliers: Riverside, CA on the low end, and San Jose on the high end. The two cities are 400 miles apart, but San Jose has a GDP per capita almost $75,000 more than Riverside (that’s more than most cities produce in a year per person).

In general, it’s clear that the productivity of a few big cities in the northeast and west coast is much higher than those in the middle of the country. Nine metros have gross domestic product over $65,000 per capita, and the only one of these not on the east or west coast is Houston.

It should be noted that this looks quite similar to the map of educational attainment: GDP per capita and educational attainment are highly correlated, and an increase in the level of talent in one’s city is associated with an increase in GDP:

We should keep in mind that gross product is a broad measure of economic activity:  it picks up the value of goods and services produced in an area, including the rental value of owner-occupied homes and returns to physical capital.  While most labor income in a metropolitan area goes to residents of that area, capital income often goes to owners who live elsewhere.  Since GMP measures the value of services where businesses are located, rather than where shareholders live, it apportions the capital returns for banks in New York, to New York, and for software firms in Seattle, to Seattle, rather than to the location of the shareholders of these firms.

Some technical notes:  The Bureau of Economic Analysis measures gross domestic product of metropolitan areas in chained 2009 dollars.  These data are for calendar year 2013; annual data for 2014 should be released in the third quarter of this year.  You can explore GDP by industry sector to see which industries make the biggest contribution to regional output in each metropolitan area.  Detailed data are available on the BEA website:  http://www.bea.gov/regional/index.htm

Keeping it Weird:  The Secret to Portland’s Economic Success

Posted on by Joe Cortright

Note: This article appeared originally in the February 13, 2010, edition of The Oregonian. Forgive any anachronistic references.

These are tough economic times. Although economists tell us the recession is officially over, a double-digit unemployment rate tells us something different. The bruising battle over the economic consequences of tax Measures 66 and 67 underscored deep disagreement — and uncertainty — about Oregon’s economic future.

What will we do for a strategy? I think you can find the answer hidden in plain sight. Keep Portland Weird. You’ve seen the bumper sticker around town. It’s funny and controversial. It’s spawned imitators (Keep Portland Beered, Keep Portland Wired) and competitors (Keep Vancouver Normal). But it’s not just a bumper sticker — it’s an economic strategy.

In a turbulent economy, being different and being open to new ideas about how to do things are remarkably important competitive advantages.

The bumper sticker may not be original — apparently the idea was imported from a buy-local campaign in Austin, Texas — but it is popular, with more than 18,000 of the stickers sold. And make no mistake, Portland is weird, at least compared with other major U.S. metropolitan areas.

We developed a weirdness index for the national organization CEOs for Cities that measures the differences in behavior based on 60 different indicators of what people do, watch, read and consume.

We used this data to rank the 50 largest metro areas, based on how closely their patterns tracked the overall national average. Portland ranks 11th of the 50.

The most normal places in the country are in the Midwest. Consumption patterns, attitudes and behaviors in St. Louis, Kansas City, Cincinnati and Columbus almost exactly match national norms.

Trying to summarize weirdness in a single index is, of course, a contradiction in terms. Every weird city is weird in its own unique way. San Francisco and Salt Lake City rank among the weirdest — most different from the U.S. average in attitudes, activities and behaviors –but are nothing alike. So it makes sense to drill down to find out what makes each place distinctive.

In what ways is Portland weird? As you might expect, recreation, environmentalism, and great food and drink figure prominently. Compared with the U.S. average, Portlanders are twice as likely to go camping, 60 percent more likely to go hiking or backpacking and 40 percent more likely to golf or hunt. Portland has the highest per-capita ownership of hybrid vehicles of any city, and more people belong to environmental groups. We also rank above average in consumption of alcohol, coffee and tea.

Another way to track local weirdness is to look at what terms people are searching for on the Internet. According to Google over the past year, Portland ranks first among U.S. metro areas for the search terms “sustainability,” “vegan,” “farmers market,” “cyclocross,” “microbrew” and “dragonboat,” and second — after Seattle — for “espresso.”

But aside from winning bar bets or playing Trivial Pursuit, what’s the economic importance of being weird?

As it turns out, a lot.

When it comes to economic success in today’s economy, the key is to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter counsels businesses that “competitive strategy is about being different.” And the late, great urbanist Jane Jacobs told us, “The greatest asset that a city can have is something that’s different from every other place.”

Practical examples of how distinctive local behaviors translate into economic activity are right in our own backyard.

Back in the ’60s, at a time when most adults didn’t sweat in public if they could avoid it, people in Oregon started the trend of jogging and running for health. One guy started selling these people Japanese sneakers out of the back of his station wagon: Phil Knight. The company he founded is a global powerhouse.

A similar story could be told about two avowed ex-hippie home brewers, who as soon as it was legal to do so, started selling kegs of their beer to local restaurants out of the back of their Datsun pickup. Kurt and Rob Widmer, and a host of other amateurs turned entrepreneurs, ignited a trend that is even today reshaping the brewing industry.

The conventional business wisdom of the 1960s or 1970s would never have forecast that Portland would become a hotbed for two industries that were either in steep decline (shoes) or increasingly monopolized by giant corporations (beer). But with local consumers who were willing to take a flier on something new — and whose tastes anticipated a much larger shift in global attitudes — athletic apparel and microbrewing both became signature industry clusters in metropolitan Portland.

True entrepreneurship is about deviant behavior: starting a business that makes a product that no one else has thought of or thinks there’s a market for. Entrepreneurs and open-minded, experimental customers go hand-in-hand.

Openness to change isn’t just about new products or services; it’s about community and government as well. Oregonians’ willingness to test novel or untried ideas of all kinds — urban growth boundaries, modern streetcars, vote-by-mail, death-with-dignity — is both representative of a widely held attitude towards change and a powerful advantage in a fast-moving world.

And in many cases, innovative public policies are essential to growing new industries. Microbrewers owe their early start, in part, to Oregon’s decision to be one of the first states to legalize craft brewing. Many Portland businesses are exporting the knowledge gained from the region’s pioneering work in urban planning, streetcars, green buildings and cycling.

Openness to new ideas also is critical to attracting and retaining mobile, talented young people — the college-educated 25- to 34-year-olds I call the “young and restless.” Our in-depth national study of migration trends showed that over the past decade, Portland has seen a 50 percent increase in this group, the fifth-fastest growth of any large metro area.

Portland’s special character, and the sense that one can live their values and make a mark, are key to this migration. As one interviewee put it: “This place communicates to newcomers that it ‘isn’t done yet’ and that there’s an opportunity for me to contribute to what it will become.”

To be sure, the Keep Portland Weird mantra has spawned detractors and wags: Keep Vancouver Normal. Keep Portland Sanctimonious. We shouldn’t do things just to be different, but we should never be dissuaded from trying something simply because it is different or would make us different from other places.

Decades ago, Gov. Tom McCall understood and gave voice to this sense of Oregon exceptionalism, when he famously said, “Come visit, but don’t stay.” Our pioneering spirit runs deep. Remember, the state’s motto is “She flies with her own wings,” which in today’s parlance would be translated as marching to the beat of a different drum.

Keeping Portland Weird ought to be the theme of our economic strategy. Especially today. As Hunter S. Thompson advised, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. We can be reasonably certain that the U.S. and world economies will need to change dramatically to meet the challenges we face in coping with climate change, providing health care and building livable communities. In the days ahead, being weird can be a competitive advantage.

Making weirdness your marketing slogan turns the usual logic of boosterism on its head. The conventional wisdom prescribes emphasizing a “good business climate” — usually consisting of the same things you find everywhere else, just cheaper. Traditional strategies chiefly involve clinging to the past or shamelessly clumsily copying what everyone else is doing.

If one buys into the view that the “world is flat” — the metaphorical reference to a level playing field in a global market — the temptation is to focus on making yourself “flatter.” In reality, the world though smaller and more tightly linked, isn’t flat. There are giant spikes of industry, creativity and inventiveness in particular places. So the key is to understand what your “spikes” are and capitalize on them. The alternative strategy — make Portland flatter — is a recipe for mediocrity and failure in a global knowledge-based economy where the ability to generate new ideas and turn them into businesses and better communities is the only source of sustainable competitive advantage.

No one can predict what will be the industries of the future. They have to be invented and created through trial and error — lots of trials, and almost as many errors. A place that is open to new ideas — especially weird ones — is by its nature better positioned to generate the kinds of trials that lead to these new industries.

Understanding Your City’s Distinctiveness Through Occupational Data

Posted on by Joe Cortright

At City Observatory, we’ve come the conclusion that every city has its own unique characteristics that both define its identity and which play a key role in shaping its economic opportunities.  These distinctive traits don’t always shine through in conventional economic data, which leads us to look for the rare statistics that convey more nuance about every place.

One such data source is the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Statistics (OES).  The OES includes metropolitan-level estimates of the number of workers in occupational categories, as well as estimates of the range of pay levels.  It’s possible to use the occupational employment estimates to calculate a location quotient–a measure of specialization, which shows how much larger or smaller a share of a region’s employment base is made up of a particular occupation.  We used the OES data to identify the occupation in each metropolitan area with the highest location quotient–indicating the occupation in each metropolitan area that is the most disproportionately likely to be found in that region compared to all others.  Note that the occupation with the highest location quotient is not necessarily the most common occupation in the region, just the one that is more concentrated in that region than any other occupation, relative to the typical metropolitan area.

Occupations with high location quotients are indicators of a city’s knowledge specializations.   While it’s hard to measure knowledge directly, occupational data give us a window into where the most highly developed knowledge is located. These knowledge specializations have important economic development implications.  If you’re looking to grow a business and be successful, you want a pool of talented people who understand your industry, its technology, and its markets.  The occupational data shed light on the concentrations of specially talented workers.  The leading specializations for each of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas are shown here.



 

These data confirm many of our intuitive notions about the clustering of industries, knowledge, and occupations.  New York’s leading occupation is fashion designers, Los Angeles’s is media and communication workers.  Las Vegas is the leader for gaming workers, Washington for political scientists, and blue collar Milwaukee for foundry mold and coremakers.

It’s interesting to compare metro specializations to those for entire states.  We compared our results to those generated for states by the website Mental Floss who prepared “Which job is most unique to your state?” — a similar analysis of state occupational distinctiveness a couple of months ago.

Many cities share their principal occupational specialization with the state they are located in, but in other cases, there’s evidence of an urban-rural divide.  In Louisiana the most distinctive occupation is captains, mates and pilots of water vessels, while in New Orleans, its entertainers, performers, and sports workers. Oregon’s leading occupation is logging workers, but in metro Portland, the most specialized occupation is semiconductor processors.

Occupational data provide a rich source of insight into the knowledge, skills, and abilities of a region’s workers.  Those who want to explore the occupational approach to understanding city distinctiveness should read this paper by Ann Markusen and Greg Schrock.

 

How “anti-social” capital varies by city

Posted on by Joe Cortright

The number of security guards is a good measure of a city’s level of “anti-social” capital

We thought we’d take an updated look at one of our favorite indicators of “social-capital”–the number of private security guards as a share of the local workforce.  Having lots of security guards is likely an indicator of distrust and disorder; organizations hire more security guards when they’re worried about crime, theft or property damage.

We haven’t looked at this indicator since before the Covid pandemic, and wanted to see if much had changed.  In the aggregate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of security guards (occupational code 33-9032) has increased by more than 100,000 since 2013, from 1,066,730 to 1,202,940, but that increase is roughly in line with total employment growth over the past decade.

Which cities have the most security guards per capita?

Just as the U.S. has a higher fraction of security guards than other nations, some cities have more security guards than others. To understand these patterns, we’ve compiled Bureau of Labor Statistics data from the Occupational Employment Survey on private security guards. BLS defines security guards as persons who guard, patrol, or monitor premises to prevent theft, violence, or infractions of rules, and whom may operate x-ray and metal detector equipment. (The definition excludes TSA airport security workers).

This occupational data reports the number of security guards in every large metropolitan area in the country. Adjusting these counts by the size of the workforce in each metro area tells us which places have proportionately the most security guards–which are arguably the least trusting–and which places have the fewest security guards, which may tend to indicate higher levels of social trust. We rank metropolitan areas by the BLS estimates of the number of security guards per 1,000 workers.  For particularly large metro areas, we report BLS estimates for the largest metropolitan division in a metro area.)

Security Guards per 1,000 Workers, 2023


At the top of the list is Las Vegas. While the typical large metro area has about 8 security guards per 1,000 workers, Las Vegas has 18 per 1,000.  Memphis ranks second, with not quite twice as many (14 per 1000) as the average large metro. Other cities with high ratios of security guards to population are New Orleans, Miami and Baltimore. Washington D.C., with its high concentration of government offices, defense and intelligence agencies, and federal contractors, also has a high proportion of security guards.

At the other end of the spectrum are a number of cities in which the ratio of security guards to workforce is one-third lower than in the typical metro area. At the bottom of the list are Grand Rapids, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Providence and Portland, all with fewer than six security guards per 1,000 workers. (The Twin Cities and Portland also do well on most of Putnam’s measures of social capital)

Security Guards as Anti-Social Capital

In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam popularized the term “social capital.” Putnam also developed a clever series of statistics for measuring social capital. He looked at survey data about interpersonal trust (can most people be trusted?) as well as behavioral data (do people regularly visit neighbors, attend public meetings, belong to civic organizations?). Putnam’s measures try to capture the extent to which social interaction is underpinned by widely shared norms of openness and reciprocity.

It seems logical to assume that there are some characteristics of place which signify the absence of social capital. One of these is the amount of effort that people spend to protect their lives and property. In a trusting utopia, we might give little thought to locking our doors or thinking about a “safe” route to travel. In a more troubled community, we have to devote more of our time, energy, and work to looking over our shoulders and protecting what we have.

The presence of security guards in a place is arguably a good indicator of this “negative social capital.” Guards are needed because a place otherwise lacks the norms of reciprocity that are needed to assure good order and behavior. The steady increase in the number of security guards and the number of places (apartments, dormitories, public buildings) to which access is secured by guards indicates the absence of trust.

The number of security guards in the United States has increased from about 600,000 in 1980 to more than 1,000,000 in 2000 (Strom et al., 2010). These figures represent a steep increase from earlier years. In 1960, there were only about 250,000 guards, watchmen and doormen, according to the Census (which used a different occupational classification scheme than is used today). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the number of US security guards has increased by almost 100,000 since 2010, to a total of more than 1.1 million. As a measure of how paranoid and unwelcoming we are as a nation, security guards outnumber receptionists by more than 100,000 workers nationally.

Sam Bowles and Arjun Jayadev argue that we have become “one nation under guard” and say that the growth of guard labor is symptomatic of growing inequality. The U.S. has the dubious distinction of employing a larger share of its workers as guards than other industrialized nations and there seems to be a correlation between national income inequality and guard labor.

It seems somewhat paradoxical, but the salaries paid to security guards get treated as a net contribution to gross domestic product. Yet, in many important senses, security guards don’t add to the overall value of goods and services so much as they serve to keep the ownership of those goods and services from being rearranged. As Nobel prize winning economist Douglass North has argued, we ought to view the cost of enforcing property rights as a “transaction cost.” In that sense, cities that require lots of guards to assure that property isn’t stolen or damaged and that residents, workers, or customers aren’t victimized, actually have higher costs of living and doing business than other places. These limits on easy interaction may stifle some of the key advantages to being in cities.

Measuring “anti-social” capital

Posted on by Joe Cortright

The number of security guards is a good measure of a city’s level of “anti-social” capital

In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam popularized the term “social capital.” Putnam also developed a clever series of statistics for measuring social capital. He looked at survey data about interpersonal trust (can most people be trusted?) as well as behavioral data (do people regularly visit neighbors, attend public meetings, belong to civic organizations?). Putnam’s measures try to capture the extent to which social interaction is underpinned by widely shared norms of openness and reciprocity.

It seems logical to assume that there are some characteristics of place which signify the absence of social capital. One of these is the amount of effort that people spend to protect their lives and property. In a trusting utopia, we might give little thought to locking our doors or thinking about a “safe” route to travel. In a more troubled community, we have to devote more of our time, energy, and work to looking over our shoulders and protecting what we have.

The presence of security guards in a place is arguably a good indicator of this “negative social capital.” Guards are needed because a place otherwise lacks the norms of reciprocity that are needed to assure good order and behavior. The steady increase in the number of security guards and the number of places (apartments, dormitories, public buildings) to which access is secured by guards indicates the absence of trust.

The number of security guards in the United States has increased from about 600,000 in 1980 to more than 1,000,000 in 2000 (Strom et al., 2010). These figures represent a steep increase from earlier years. In 1960, there were only about 250,000 guards, watchmen and doormen, according to the Census (which used a different occupational classification scheme than is used today). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the number of US security guards has increased by almost 100,000 since 2010, to a total of more than 1.1 million. As a measure of how paranoid and unwelcoming we are as a nation, security guards outnumber receptionists by more than 100,000 workers nationally.

Sam Bowles and Arjun Jayadev argue that we have become “one nation under guard” and say that the growth of guard labor is symptomatic of growing inequality. The U.S. has the dubious distinction of employing a larger share of its workers as guards than other industrialized nations and there seems to be a correlation between national income inequality and guard labor.

Just as the U.S. has a higher fraction of security guards than other nations, some cities have more security guards than others. To understand these patterns, we’ve compiled Bureau of Labor Statistics data from the Occupational Employment Survey on private security guards. BLS defines security guards as persons who guard, patrol, or monitor premises to prevent theft, violence, or infractions of rules, and whom may operate x-ray and metal detector equipment. (The definition excludes TSA airport security workers).

This occupational data reports the number of security guards in every large metropolitan area in the country. Adjusting these counts by the size of the workforce in each metro area tells us which places have proportionately the most security guards–which are arguably the least trusting–and which places have the fewest security guards, which may tend to indicate higher levels of social trust. We rank metropolitan areas by the BLS estimates of the number of security guards per 1,000 workers.  For particularly large metro areas, we report BLS estimates for the largest metropolitan division in a metro area.)

Security Guards per 1,000 Workers, 2017

At the top of the list is Las Vegas. While the typical large metro area has about 8 security guards per 1,000 workers, Las Vegas has 19 per 1,000.  Miami ranks second, with more than  twice as many (18 per 1000) as the average large metro. Other cities with high ratios of security guards to population are Memphis, New Orleans, Miami and Baltimore. Washington D.C., with its high concentration of government offices, defense and intelligence agencies, and federal contractors, also has a high proportion of security guards.

At the other end of the spectrum are a number of cities in which the ratio of security guards to workforce is one-third lower than in the typical metro area. At the bottom of the list are Minneapolis-St. Paul, Grand Rapids and Portland, all with fewer than six security guards per 1,000 workers. (The Twin Cities and Portland also do well on most of Putnam’s measures of social capital)

It seems somewhat paradoxical, but the salaries paid to security guards get treated as a net contribution to gross domestic product. Yet, in many important senses, security guards don’t add to the overall value of goods and services so much as they serve to keep the ownership of those goods and services from being rearranged. As Nobel prize winning economist Douglass North has argued, we ought to view the cost of enforcing property rights as a “transaction cost.” In that sense, cities that require lots of guards to assure that property isn’t stolen or damaged and that residents, workers, or customers aren’t victimized, actually have higher costs of living and doing business than other places. These limits on easy interaction may stifle some of the key advantages to being in cities.

The varying thickness of the blue line

Posted on by Joe Cortright

Cops per capita: An indicator of “Anti-social” capital?” 

Why do some cities have vastly fewer police officers relative to their population than others?

In the 1966 film “The Thin Blue Line” director William Friedkin explored the role police officers played in protecting the broader populace from violence and disorder. As we’ve frequently noted at City Observatory, there’s been a marked, and in many ways, under-appreciated decline in crime rates in American cities.  In the typical large city, crime is less than half what it was when Friedkin filmed.  Interestingly, the thickness of the “blue line” varies widely across US metro areas. We think that’s a possible indicator of which places perceive they need more police in order to live safely.  The fact that some cities have far fewer police than others suggests that social capital and other factors deterring crime may be more important in explaining variations in crime rates.

If it seems like there are a lot of police in New York, you’re right.

Previously, we’ve used counts of the number of security guards per capita as an indicator of “anti-social” capital. Our measurement built on the idea of social capital explained by Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone. Putnam developed a clever series of statistics for measuring social capital. He looked at survey data about interpersonal trust (can most people be trusted?) as well as behavioral data (do people regularly visit neighbors, attend public meetings, belong to civic organizations?). Putnam’s measures try to capture the extent to which social interaction is underpinned by widely shared norms of openness and reciprocity.

It seems logical to assume that there are some characteristics of place which signify the absence of social capital. One of these is the amount of effort that people spend to protect their lives and property. In a trusting utopia, we might give little thought to locking our doors or thinking about a “safe” route to travel. In a more troubled community, we have to devote more of our time, energy, and work to looking over our shoulders and protecting what we have.

We argued that the presence of security guards in a place is arguably a good indicator of this “negative social capital.” Guards are needed because a place otherwise lacks the norms of reciprocity that are needed to assure good order and behavior. The steady increase in the number of security guards and the number of places (apartments, dormitories, public buildings) to which access is secured by guards indicates the absence of trust.

Might the same notion apply to public safety officers? If some places feel the need to hire more police to feel safe, doesn’t that suggest an absence of social capital? A few weeks back, we were introduced to an analysis of the police to population ratio by state. Compiled by Bill McGonigle, this analysis used data from the FBI’s Crime in the United States, to estimate the total number of police in each state, and then divided the result by population. That got us thinking about creating a similar index for metropolitan areas. The FBI’s data aren’t reported by MSA, so instead we looked to the Census Bureau.

We undertake this comparison at the metropolitan level, using data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. For the most part, using metro data nets out the effects of the wide variations in the demographics of central city boundaries from place to place, which tends to confound municipal comparisons. (For example, the cities of Miami and Atlanta include less than 10 percent of the population of their metro areas, while Jacksonville and San Antonio include a majority, including areas that would be regarded as “suburban” elsewhere.)The ACS asks respondents about their occupation, three occupations correspond to police officers:

3710:  First-line supervisors of police and detectives

3820:  Detectives and criminal investigators

3870:  Police officers

We used the University of Minnesota’s invaluable IPUMS* data source to tabulate these data by metropolitan area. The underlying data are from the 2014-2018 five-year American Community Survey.  There’s one underlying quirk of the ACS data to be aware of:  respondents are classified according to where they live, rather than where they work. Because most metropolitan areas are large and encompass entire labor markets, that’s a reasonably accurate way of counting; but in some metro areas, where people commute from outside the metro area, this may not accurate count the number of police employed locally.

When we tabulate the data for metropolitan areas with a million or more population, and divide the number of police by the population of each metro area, we get the following ranking.  (We report the number of police officers per 1,000 population, metro areas with the fewest police per capita are shown at the top of the list).

There’s a wide variation in the number of police per capita across metro areas.  While the median metropolitan area has about 3.3 police officers per 1,000 population, some have as few as 2.4, while others have 5 or more.

The cities with the fewest police officers include San Jose, Portland, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis and Seattle.  The top cities on our list mostly coincide with the top states on McGonigle’s list of police population ratios.  Oregon, Washington, Minnesota and Utah rank  first, second, fourth and fifth, respectively, of the state’s with the fewest police officers per capita. (The Twin Cities, Seattle, Salt Lake and Portland also do well on most of Putnam’s measures of social capital).

Recall that our data is on the number of police living in each metro area. We suspect that the relatively low number of police per thousand population in San Jose (1.6) and Los Angeles (2.4) reflects the high cost of housing and long distance commuting in these areas. Riverside, which is adjacent to Los Angeles has a much higher than average number of police per 1,000 population (4.50).  It seems likely that proportionately more police officers commute from adjacent areas outside the Los Angeles and San Jose metro areas which have lower housing costs.

The metro areas with the most police officers per capita include Virginia Beach, Las Vegas, and Miami.  Some of the cities with high numbers of police fit our media stereotypes:  Law and Order (New York) and The Wire (Baltimore) both rank in the top five for police per capita, both have at least 50 percent more police per capita than the typical large metro in the US.

Security Guards and Police Officers

As we mentioned, we’ve previously looked at the number of security guards per capita as another indicator of “anti-social capital.” We thought we’d look at the relationship between the number of police officers per capita and the number of security guards per capita. In theory, it might be the case that private security guards could be filling a gap, i.e. more common in places where the public sector isn’t providing “enough” security. Or alternatively, it could be that fear or security concerns could lead to having both more public police and more security guards in some cities, and fewer in others.

The data strongly support the latter interpretation. The following chart shows the per capita number of police (from the chart above) and the per capita number of security guards (from the same ACS survey from which we drew our police officer counts). Each dot represents one of the largest US metro areas. We’ve excluded three metro areas from our calculations: San Jose and Los Angeles (because of the commuting issue discussed above) and Las Vegas, because it is a wide outlier, with far more security guards per capita than any other city.

There’s a strong positive correlation between the number of police per capita and the number of security guards per capita in a metropolitan area. Places that tend to have more police, also tend to have more security guards. Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis all rank low in both the number of security guards and police per capita.  Conversely, New York, Washington, Baltimore and New Orleans have high numbers of both police and security guards. Most cities fall relatively close to the regression line we’ve plotted on the chart, but there are some outliers. Miami and Orlando have relatively more private security guards than police; while Virginia Beach has many more police than security guards. This tends to reinforce our view that out metric is reflecting anti-social capital, or perhaps more accurately, the absence of social capital in some cities. Both the public sector and the private sector spend considerably more resources in some metro areas than others in order to protect persons and property, almost certainly because they believe that localized norms of behavior and reciprocity are inadequate.

 

* – Steven Ruggles, Sarah Flood, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, Erin Meyer, Jose Pacas and Matthew Sobek. IPUMS USA: Version 10.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2020. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V10.0

How distinct is your city?

Posted on by CityObservatory Guest

Every city has its own unique characteristics. We know that industrial and occupational specializations can be measured using standard economic tools like location quotients. But some of the more intangible characteristics of cities are harder to measure. We’re always on the look out for new and interesting ways of discerning city distinctiveness. The Internet search engine Google provides one window into the way people think about cities.

Unless you’ve been using AOL out of spite, you’ve at least seen Google’s auto fill capability. As you start typing your query, Google tries to guess what you are searching for drawing on its database of the most common search queries.

Some have used this capability as a way to create a natural experiment on human perceptions. Renee diResta hit on the idea of using the Google auto fill function to tease out stereotypes of states. She Googled a state name, and let Google suggest answers, asking for example “Why is [California] so…?”. She noted which words Google suggested and tabulated the results for states. Nate Shivar then took up the mantle, looking at cities instead of states.

We thought this was extremely interesting– if unscientific — and could illustrate how different cities are perceived. Here are Nate Shivar’s results for 50 cities, which we’ve sorted according to the most commonly searched terms. The most Googled term was “expensive” (14 of 50 cities) followed by boring, dangerous, ghetto, and bad. Some search terms were idiosyncratic to a single city, such as “Why does Salt Lake City have such wide streets?” Some places, like Raleigh or Indianapolis registered only one or two descriptors; perhaps they don’t trigger any distinctive characterizations There were some that were clearly not about the city, like Why is Charlotte so uneasy about being on a ship? (Readers of The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle will know why).

We built the following map to illustrate the geographic patterns of the most common city descriptors. In order to see where apparently the most “ghetto,” polluted or boring places are, all you have to do is click the drop down below for the description of your choice, and select “Y.” (As a side note, if you choose “N” for no, the map will show all of the places that Google users don’t describe as boring, bad, etc. To reset the map, just choose “All” for whatever descriptions you have selected.) To see what the top 4 descriptions are for each city, hover your mouse over the location.

Some of the more interesting observations are:

  • Apparently, Google searchers don’t worry about cities in the Western half of the country as being “bad” or “dangerous.”
  • Many Northern cities you expect to be cold are listed as such, but places like Atlanta and San Diego are seen –by the Google masses– as cold, too. (We didn’t add hot into the map, because there weren’t any surprises there.)
  • Either people simply expected their east coast (…and Midwest … and southern..) cities to be polluted, or one pocket in the West/Southwest — the cities Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix and Salt Lake City– has particularly bad pollution problems. (While this may be true, big industrial cities like Pittsburgh don’t have people asking why they’re polluted, so we think some of this may be the surprise associated with a city like Denver being polluted.)
  • Concerns about racism are most frequently expressed in three cities: Boston, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. Interestingly, none of these cities is among the most racially segregated, a group that is led by Detroit, Milwaukee and New York (detailed list is here)
  • With the exception of Minneapolis, if you want live cheaply, don’t live on a coast.
  • The more unusual descriptions follow: Jacksonville is smoky; Portland is white; Detroit is black; Tampa Bay is trashy; Philadelphia is either bad or great; Providence/Rhode Island is corrupt; and, apparently, Google often confuses Columbus — the city in Ohio — with the 15th century explorer.

Thanks very much to Nate Shivar investigating auto fill for cities. Based on his later revisions, like Providence and Rhode Island as a whole are synonymous to many, we updated the descriptions for this analysis. To dig in more to distinctiveness and our take on it, go here. For questions regarding this analysis or anything else, feel free to email info@cityobservatory.org.

Anti-Social Capital?

Posted on by Joe Cortright

In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam popularized the term “social capital.” Putnam also developed a clever series of statistics for measuring social capital. He looked at survey data about interpersonal trust (can most people be trusted?) as well as behavioral data (do people regularly visit neighbors, attend public meetings, belong to civic organizations?). Putnam’s measures try to capture the extent to which social interaction is underpinned by widely shared norms of openness and reciprocity.

It seems logical to assume that there are some characteristics of place which signify the absence of social capital. One of these is the amount of effort that people spend to protect their lives and property. In a trusting utopia, we might give little thought to locking our doors or thinking about a “safe” route to travel. In a more troubled community, we have to devote more of our time, energy, and work to looking over our shoulders and protecting what we have.

The presence of security guards in a place is arguably a good indicator of this “negative social capital.” Guards are needed because a place otherwise lacks the norms of reciprocity that are needed to assure good order and behavior. The steady increase in the number of security guards and the number of places (apartments, dormitories, public buildings) to which access is secured by guards indicates the absence of trust.

The number of security guards in the United States has increased from about 600,000 in 1980 to more than 1,000,000 in 2000 (Strom et al., 2010). These figures represent a steep increase from earlier years. In 1960, there were only about 250,000 guards, watchmen and doormen, according to the Census (which used a different occupational classification scheme than is used today).

This trend has led Sam Bowles and Arjun Jayadev to argue that we have become “one nation under guard” and that the growth of guard labor is symptomatic of growing inequality. The U.S. has the dubious distinction of employing a larger share of its workers as guards than other industrialized nations and there seems to be a correlation between national income inequality and guard labor.

Just as the U.S. has a higher fraction of security guards than other nations, some cities have more security guards than others. To understand these patterns, we’ve compiled Bureau of Labor Statistics data from the Occupational Employment Survey on private security guards. BLS defines security guards as persons who guard, patrol, or monitor premises to prevent theft, violence, or infractions of rules, and whom may operate x-ray and metal detector equipment. (The definition excludes TSA airport security workers). In 2015, there were more than 1,050,000 security guards in the US.

This occupational data reports the number of security guards in every large metropolitan area in the country. Adjusting these counts by the size of the population in each metro area tells us which places have proportionately the most security guards– which are arguably the least trusting, and which places have the fewest security guards. This may be an indicator of higher levels of social trust.

Here are the data:

At the top of the list is Las Vegas. While the typical large metro area has about 39 security guards per 10,000 population, these Miami has more than  twice as many (86 per 10,000). Other cities with high ratios of security guards to population are Memphis, New Orleans, Miami and Baltimore. Washington D.C., with its high concentration of government offices, defense and intelligence agencies, and federal contractors, also has a high proportion of security guards.

At the other end of the spectrum are a number of cities in which the ratio of security guards to population is one-third lower than in the typical metro area. At the bottom of the list are Minneapolis-St. Paul, Providence and Portland. (The Twin Cities and Portland also do well on most of Putnam’s measures of social capital)

It seems somewhat paradoxical, but the salaries paid to security guards get treated as a net contribution to gross domestic product. Yet, in many important senses, security guards don’t add to the overall value of goods and services so much as they serve to keep the ownership of those goods and services from being rearranged. As Nobel prize winning economist Douglass North has argued, we ought to view the cost of enforcing property rights as a “transaction cost.” In that sense, cities that require lots of guards to assure that property isn’t stolen or damaged and that residents, workers, or customers aren’t victimized, actually have higher costs of living and doing business than other places. These limits on easy interaction may stifle some of the key advantages to being in cities.

Anti-Social Capital?

Posted on by Joe Cortright

In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam popularized the term “social capital.” Putnam also developed a clever series of statistics for measuring social capital. He looked at survey data about interpersonal trust (can most people be trusted?) as well as behavioral data (do people regularly visit neighbors, attend public meetings, belong to civic organizations?). Putnam’s measures try to capture the extent to which social interaction is underpinned by widely shared norms of openness and reciprocity.

It seems logical to assume that there are some characteristics of place which signify the absence of social capital. One of these is the amount of effort that people spend to protect their lives and property. In a trusting utopia, we might give little thought to locking our doors or thinking about a “safe” route to travel. In a more troubled community, we have to devote more of our time, energy, and work to looking over our shoulders and protecting what we have.

The presence of security guards in a place is arguably a good indicator of this “negative social capital.” Guards are needed because a place otherwise lacks the norms of reciprocity that are needed to assure good order and behavior. The steady increase in the number of security guards and the number of places (apartments, dormitories, public buildings) to which access is secured by guards indicates the absence of trust.

The number of security guards in the United States has increased from about 600,000 in 1980 to more than 1,000,000 in 2000 (Strom et al., 2010). These figures represent a steep increase from earlier years. In 1960, there were only about 250,000 guards, watchmen and doormen, according to the Census (which used a different occupational classification scheme than is used today).

This trend has led Sam Bowles and Arjun Jayadev to argue that we have become “one nation under guard” and that the growth of guard labor is symptomatic of growing inequality. The U.S. has the dubious distinction of employing a larger share of its workers as guards than other industrialized nations and there seems to be a correlation between national income inequality and guard labor.

Just as the U.S. has a higher fraction of security guards than other nations, some cities have more security guards than others. To understand these patterns, we’ve compiled Bureau of Labor Statistics data from the Occupational Employment Survey on private security guards. BLS defines security guards as persons who guard, patrol, or monitor premises to prevent theft, violence, or infractions of rules, and whom may operate x-ray and metal detector equipment. (The definition excludes TSA airport security workers).

This occupational data reports the number of security guards in every large metropolitan area in the country. Adjusting these counts by the size of the workforce in each metro area tells us which places have proportionately the most security guards– which are arguably the least trusting, and which places have the fewest security guards. This may be an indicator of higher levels of social trust.

Here are the data:

At the top of the list are Las Vegas and Miami. While the typical large metro area has about 9 security guards per 1,000 workers, these two cities have roughly twice as many (Las Vegas as 21 per 1,000; Miami 17 per 1,000. Washington D.C., with its high concentration of government offices, defense and intelligence agencies, and federal contractors, also has a high proportion of security guards.

At the other end of the spectrum are a number of cities in which security guards make up about one-third less of the workforce than in the typical metro area. At the bottom of the list are Minneapolis-St. Paul, Providence and Portland. (The Twin Cities and Portland also do well on most of Putnam’s measures of social capital)

It seems somewhat paradoxical, but the salaries paid to security guards get treated as a net contribution to gross domestic product. Yet, in many important senses, security guards don’t add to the overall value of goods and services so much as they serve to keep the ownership of those goods and services from being rearranged. As Nobel prize winning economist Douglass North has argued, we ought to view the cost of enforcing property rights as a “transaction cost.” In that sense, cities that require lots of guards to assure that property isn’t stolen or damaged and that residents, workers, or customers aren’t victimized, actually have higher costs of living and doing business than other places. These limits on easy interaction may stifle some of the key advantages to being in cities.