Daniel Hartley

Are America’s Inner Cities Competitive? Evidence From the 2000s

In the years since Michael Porter’s research about the potential competitiveness of inner cities, there has been growing evidence of a residential resurgence in urban neighborhoods. Yet there is less evidence on the competitiveness of inner cities for employment. The authors document the trends in net employment growth and find that inner cities gained over 1.8 million jobs between 2002 and 2011 at a rate comparable with suburban areas. The authors also find a significant number of inner cities are competitive over this period—increasing their share of metropolitan employment in 144 out of 281 metropolitan statistical areas. Also described is the pattern of job growth within the inner city. The authors find that tracts that grew faster tended to be closer to downtown, with access to transit and adjacent to areas with higher population growth. However, tracts with higher poverty rates experienced less job growth, indicating that barriers still exist in the inner city.

CHAPTER 3. The Relationship Between City Center Density and Urban Growth or Decline

Working papers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment on research in progress. They may not have been subject to the formal editorial review accorded offi cial Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland publications. The views stated herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In this paper we contrast the spatial patterns of population density and other demographic changes in growing versus shrinking MSAs from 1980 to 2010. We fi nd that, on average, shrinking MSAs show the steepest drop in population density near the Central Business District (CBD). Motivated by this fact, we explore the connection between changes in population density at the core of the MSA and MSA productivity. We fi nd that changes in near-CBD population density are positively associated with per capita income growth at the MSA-level.