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Robert Manduca, a PhD candidate in sociology at Harvard, assembled a dot map showing every job in the United States of America, color-coded by industry segment. It's pretty cool.
The way it works is that red dots signify manufacturing and trade; blue dots are professional services; green dots are health care, education, and government; and yellow dots are retail and other services.
At large scale, it looks like a population density map
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Which makes sense, since you can't have a job without working within commuting distance.
Zoom in and that changes
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Hudson County, New Jersey, just west of Manhattan, is one of the most densely populated places in the United States. But there aren't many jobs there.
Chicago employment is very concentrated in the Loop
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The mismatch between people and jobs is especially striking in Chicago, whose outlying neighborhoods are full of people but scarce on employment. It's a classic form of schematic city planning, in which freeways and transit lines radiate out from a hyper-concentrated zone of employment.
Los Angeles has no core
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Los Angeles looks very different. Yes, there are a lot of jobs downtown, especially red dots signifying light industry and warehousing. But there is a thick stretch of employment stretching west of downtown and arcing toward the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica. Then south of that arc you see several small clusters of employment. It's especially noteworthy that the blue dots of professional services are really, truly not concentrated downtown — office clusters are everywhere.
Silicon Valley is weird
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Official government statistics record Silicon Valley as a suburb of San Jose, but as the map shows, there is no real concentration of jobs — especially not the blue-colored professional services jobs — in San Jose. Instead, the economic heart of the region is a series of diffuse corporate campuses strung out along the west coast of the San Francisco Bay. As individual campuses these places not very dense, and they're not packed together, either.
Meanwhile, the residential areas surrounding them are mostly built as low-density suburbs. The result is a housing shortage that drives up prices, but also a constant transportation capacity crunch that feeds opposition to new housing.
