Demographic Data for Place of Work

I’ve had a number of questions from students looking for demographics for the city based on where people work. Most demographic data that’s collected is based on the geography where people LIVE – finding information about where people WORK in a given place is difficult, especially for small places (below the state and county level).

Rather than fixating on finding a specific statistic, you may have to evaluate several different sources to serve as a proxies to indicate areas of interest (i.e. areas that have a higher density of people engaged in commercial activity during the day). Each source is a trade-off where you’ll sacrifice one element (currency, small geography, or compilation by industry or occupation) for another.

Many sources with industry data classify businesses using the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS), a hierarchical system of codes. For definitions and a breakdown of codes visit the NAICS site. Federal and state sources will use county names (Bronx, Kings, New York, Queens, Richmond) instead of borough names (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island).

Industry / Occupation data (in order of recommendation):

1. County and ZIP Code Business Patterns – a census survey, use it to find a summary of the number of businesses and employees by industry for a county or zip code. Industries are classified using NAICS. An alternate source is the Economic Census, but the latest data for 2007 is not available yet for ZIP codes.
2. Workforce Trends in the NYC Region – the CUNY center for Urban Research has produced county and zip code level maps of establishments and employees by NAICS sectors. Change the drop down box from NYC Metro to NYC and Nassau to see the zip code level maps. (The map doesn’t label the zip codes – for a basic zip code map go here).
3. Reference USA – a library database that allows you to build lists of specific businesses by name based on geography (county, zip code), industrial classification (NAICS), and business name. For each business you’ll get data for the number of employees, sales, square footage of store, and more. Data can be summarized or downloaded into a spreadsheet.
4. 2006-2008 American Community Survey – get detailed info about people based on where they LIVE (use the map under the Neighborhoods tab of the NYC data guide to access profiles for neighborhood-like areas called PUMAs), but place of work questions are far fewer and not available below the county / borough level. For county/borough place of work data via the American Factfinder look at the American Community Survey 3 year data tables for Journey to Work data by workplace geography – the data will be broken down by transit method to work, occupation, and industry.
5. 2000 Census – definitive in that it provides work place population by all geographies (counties, ZIP Codes, census tracts) by occupation and industry, but it’s rather old for doing current research. Rather than going to the census directly, you can access compiled reports from the NYC Dept of City Planning.
6. Exisiting Reports – New York City Labor Market Information Service has detailed reports on different industries within the city, which may provide some breakdown of the data. The NYC Department of Planning has several special projects and neighborhood studies, which may include special surveys or statistics on business, traffic, and land use conducted particularly for that study.
7. Search for news – someone may have conducted their own research at some point and did a survey – search the library’s databases; Academic Search Complete, Business Source Complete, Factiva, and ABI Inform are good places to start.

Proxies for density (transit and land use)

• Transit Data – data on bus ridership by route and subway passengers by station from the MTA and pedestrian counts (foot traffic) and bicycle counts from NYMTC are available online.
• Land Use Maps – use these to identify areas based on prevailing land use – commercial, residential, industrial, etc, from the NYC Dept of Planning.

Final note – many of these sources, and others, are available via the NYC data guide.