The Suburbanization of Producer Service Employment

Abstract

Washington DC is the center of the nation's ninth largest metropolitan area (PMSA), home to 4.4 million people and 2.9 million employees in a web of 25 separate, autonomous municipalities spanning three states and the District of Columbia. As such, the region is a good place to analyze the pattern of suburbanization of producer service employment over the past 25 years. In addition to overall suburbanization, the metropolitan area has seen changes in the nature and role of its dominant economic force, the federal government. Direct federal employment has stagnated while federal contracts to private companies have soared. Producer service employment seemed to increase in importance in jurisdictions away from the region's core, simultaneous with increases in total employment, following increases in federal contracting, and independent of increases in federal employment. These trends have affected the growth of producer service employment across the metropolitan area, encouraging their suburbanization. By subjecting our initial models to sub-sector data and analysis of temporal trends in the coefficients, we uncover the uniqueness of legal services and additional evidence of suburbanization over time.his paper focuses on producer service employment within a metropolitan T area: more specifically, the geographic variation in the nature and growth of that employment across the metropolitan area over time. As the businesses and households they serve-as well as increasing proportions of their professional, technical, and even clerical labor force+have suburbanized, so too have producer services. Though the spatial and temporal paths of producer service suburbanization have not been widely studied, the sprawling and rapidly growing metropolitan Washington area provides a good general case of those temporal and spatial dynamics. Since the 1960s, widespread suburbanization

The Geographies of Producer Services

“…A high level of producer service decentralization is occurring, although much of it involves agglomerations that are relatively near to the CBD, rather than in the distant suburbs. Harrington and Campbell (1997) perform a more direct and explicit analysis of the spatial and temporal dynamics of producer services in the case of the Washington, DC, metropolitan area over the period from 1970 to 1992. They not only document the increasing suburbanization of producer services (although their spatial units are too large to permit the identification of specific employment centers), but also statistically test a number of hypotheses concerning the correlates of locational change.…”

Changes in the Intrametropolitan Location of Producer Services in Île-De-France (1978-1997): Do Information Technologies Promote A More Dispersed Spatial Pattern?

“…Indeed, the debate about the future of cities is, in our opinion, too North American-biased and enlarging this debate can provide new insights. Moreover, it is somewhat surprising to note that, with limited exceptions (Harrington and Campbell, 1997;Bodenman, 1998;Bogart and Ferry, 1999), the literature on intrametropolitan decentralization has paid little attention to the role played by producer services in the reorganization of metropolitan economies, even though there is widespread recognition that they are particularly information-dependent. Indeed, empirical analyses on this topic have merely been conducted on the basis of total employment data or broad sectoral aggregations.…”

The Location and Suburbanization of Business and Professional Services in the Atlanta Area

“…Remarkably little research, however, has focused on the intrametropolitan location of producer services, despite the rise of interest in "edge" cities or suburban employment centers (Garreau 1991;Gordon and Richardson 1996;Forstall and Greene 1997;Anas et al 1998;Bogart and Ferry 1999). With only a few exceptions that dealt with the suburbanization of these services (Stanback 1991;Harrington and Campbell 1997), most intrametropolitan studies of producer services are static and inappropriate for capturing the dynamic change in these fast-growing services. In addition, findings from limited intrametropolitan studies of producer services have not always been consistent.…”