The University of Toronto School of Cities recently looked at the changing economic geography of Fortune 500 companies across the US from 1975 to 2017. Here is a diagram of the results taken from CityLab:

New York sits at the top with 70 corporate headquarters as of 2017. But the San Francisco Bay Area is now the second largest center with 35 headquarters – a testament to tech.

The study does, however, omit service firms, as these weren’t tracked in Fortune’s list back in 1975.

Also noteworthy is the specialization that has taken place across specific cities and regions. Here is another excerpt from CityLab:

America’s headquarters geography reflects the substantial variation and specialization of the U.S. economy. New York leads in finance and business services, consumer services, and goods and materials. But Houston leads in energy, San Jose in tech, and Chicago in retail and wholesale. Chicago also ranks second in consumer services, and goods and materials, and Dallas takes third in energy. Other cities like Nashville and Minneapolis take third in consumer services, and goods and materials, respectively.

The full article can be found, here.

Sam Altman has an interesting post up on his blog talking about what he feels is a changing cultural environment in San Francisco (which is where he is based). His argument is that heresies are good for innovation and for moving the world forward. We need people to question established norms. But for that to happen we need environments and cities that encourage it, or at the very least allow it.

Here’s an excerpt:

Restricting speech leads to restricting ideas and therefore restricted innovation—the most successful societies have generally been the most open ones.  Usually mainstream ideas are right and heterodox ideas are wrong, but the true and unpopular ideas are what drive the world forward.  Also, smart people tend to have an allergic reaction to the restriction of ideas, and I’m now seeing many of the smartest people I know move elsewhere.

In San Francisco he is starting to feel that it is becoming increasingly difficult to have wacky ideas and to work on wacky startups. And for this reason, people are starting to leave the city in search of more open cultures. Openness used to be a hallmark of San Francisco. It was once the epicenter of counterculture. Has that changed?

Here is a final excerpt:

I don’t know who Satoshi is, but I’m skeptical that he, she, or they would have been able to come up with the idea for bitcoin immersed in the current culture of San Francisco—it would have seemed too crazy and too dangerous, with too many ways to go wrong.  If SpaceX started in San Francisco in 2017, I assume they would have been attacked for focusing on problems of the 1%, or for doing something the government had already decided was too hard.  I can picture Galileo looking up at the sky and whispering “E pur si muove” here today.

Click here to read the full post.

One of the great things about social media is that it gives us access to data that previously didn’t exist or was difficult to collect.

Take, for example, LinkedIn’s monthly report on employment trends called the Workforce Report. They look at which industries are hiring, where people are moving for jobs, and so on. Click here for the June 2017 edition. 

Note that architecture/engineering hiring appears to be up nationally, which is usually a positive leading indicator.

I’ll leave you all to go through the report, but I did want to pull out a few of their maps and one of their takeaways. Below are maps of the cities that lost the most workers and gained the most workers over the last 12 months.

The established trend of people moving from colder northern cities to warmer amenity-rich cities seem to play out here.

That said, one of their “key insights” is that fewer workers today are moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. Since February 2017, there has been a 17% decline in the net number of workers.

They blame housing affordability (ahem, lack of supply). People are simply turning to other great cities like Seattle, Portland, Denver, and Austin. They’re growing and cheaper.

One of the other cool things about the report is that you can drill down into individual cities to see where people are moving from. I looked up Miami and Chicago just to do a quick comparison. 

Not surprisingly, Miami is seeing a significant contingent from South America. What’s interesting about this random comparison is how international Miami is and how regional Chicago is in terms of their draws.

I would love to see similar data for Canada. This is valuable stuff.