Employment Centers are areas in the region with high employment densities. SANDAG identified the industries located in these areas, where employees commute from, and what their commute looks like, among other attributes. 

 

Employment Centers help us better understand where the high density of employment is clustered in our region, where the employees commute to, and what their commute patterns look like. We utilize this data product to inform transportation planning strategies that can best serve our communities in implementing various options for the different needs of our diverse region.  

 

SANDAG is committed to bringing actionable and informative data to jurisdictions, stakeholders, and the community by applying data science and analytics capabilities. We use this information as we continue to work together to create a region that maintains and improves our quality of life now and in the future. When more recent information becomes available, it is our commitment to incorporate that in updating our data products as feasible.  

New Data: Employment Centers 2.0 was developed using the most recent data, such as population, housing, and jobs. This version also incorporates data on non-wage and salary jobs and working remotely in order to capture current information in our region. It also considers military bases and tribal gaming facilities when identifying employment centers.  

More Granularity: Travel information breaking out by Community Planning Areas for the City of San Diego.  

100% online: Employment Centers 2.0 is 100% online and hosted on the SANDAG Open Data Portal. It offers the added benefits of interactivity and easy-access visualizations by Employment Center, Jurisdiction, Tier, and Residence.  

Improved Transparency: All underlying source data are available for downloading from the SANDAG Open Data Portal to support further research and public use.   

 

Employment Centers 2.0 distinguishes between jobs and workers to account for how the way we work is evolving as businesses adopt new technologies and approaches to delivering services and products. A job refers to a paid position that can be filled through different compensation arrangements, and a worker or employee refers to the individual who fills a job. As individuals have more flexible arrangements for filling jobs, the region is seeing more workers holding multiple jobs. As a result, the Region has more jobs than workers.  

The most common job arrangement is the employee being paid a wage or salary. However, non-wage and salary arrangements are growing. In non-wage and salary arrangements, the worker fills a position based on a contract or as “gig” work. This category can also include sole proprietors. The individual is paid based on conditions set out in a contract or on commission; the employer issues a 1099 form at the end of the year or does not pay unemployment insurance. Examples of common non-wage and salary jobs include real estate agents and Uber and Lyft drivers.   

 

Employment Centers 2.0 represents a snapshot of how and where jobs are concentrated in the Region. The employment centers are based on where businesses are located and the total number of jobs that the business supports. SANDAG recognizes that for some industries, the usual place of work may not be onsite at the business’s location.  

For some sectors, SANDAG is able to redistribute the jobs to multiple locations. For example, all the jobs associated with a public school district are not attributed to the school district’s office. Instead, SANDAG distributes the jobs to individual school buildings (e.g., across the elementary, middle, and high schools). However, for other industries, SANDAG is not able to make this correction. For example, SANDAG cannot distribute construction jobs to specific construction sites. Other industries or employers in this category include landscapers, temporary staffing agencies, and delivery workers, where headquarters were used for the allocation. 

SANDAG recognizes that this is a limitation of the data and should be considered for future improvements when feasible.  

 

The Employment Centers identify areas with high employment densities. The primary data source for identifying employment density and defining employment center boundaries is data from the California Employment Development Department (CA-EDD). It is the same source of data used in Employment Centers 1.0. Data from this source were used because they have employment at the specific location (address) of the business, enabling the calculation of employment density and its change across geographies. 

When developing Employment Centers 2.0, 2020 was the most recent data available from CA-EDD. However, SANDAG used 2019 data instead of 2020 data to identify employment centers. SANDAG made this decision based on carefully considering which would better represent a post-pandemic environment. The 2020 data clearly showed the impact of the pandemic on employment. However, some evidence pointed to the conditions in 2020 as being temporary. Businesses had received substantial pandemic-related aid to help them survive the crisis, and county-level data indicated a significant rebound in employment in 2021. 

While Employment Centers 2.0 uses 2019 CA-EDD data to identify where high employment densities exist, the job counts are based on SANDAG’s Series 15 Forecast. The job counts use the forecast’s base year, 2022, which accounts for post-COVID impacts on jobs by industry in the region.  

 

Employment Centers provide statistics of all jobs in San Diego County, regardless of where the individual filling the position resides (that is, the individual can live within or outside the San Diego region). However, at this point, SANDAG does not have adequate data to support estimating the place of residence for individuals filling the Region’s jobs.  

As a Metropolitan Planning Organization for the San Diego region, the Series 15 Regional Growth Forecast is focused on the San Diego Region. SANDAG consulted with other agencies, such as Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) and the California Department of Finance in the forecast development process. SANDAG does not make projections for surrounding areas in-state, such as Imperial, Riverside, and Orange counties, nor for areas out-of-state or out-of-country. This does not indicate SANDAG ignores the neighboring areas in its modeling effort. SANDAG’s transportation modeling team uses the Series 15 Regional Growth Forecast as well as colonia-level population projections in its cross-border model and projected trip counts originating externally from the San Diego region from surrounding counties within the United States. 

SANDAG recognizes that sharing a border with Mexico plays an important role in the San Diego Region, not just in terms of people and freight crossings but also in economic growth. The story of who crosses the border to work in the San Diego Region is becoming more complicated, especially as the ease of crossing the border improves and remote work flexibility becomes more prevalent. SANDAG continues to track these dynamics, looking for future opportunities to incorporate them into the Employment Centers analysis.  

SANDAG will continue collaborating with other regions where practical and feasible. The cross-border travel behavior is an integral part of the SANDAG Activity Based Transportation Model. InfoBits on Cross-Border Travel and InfoBits on Impacts of Border Delays demonstrate our recent research study.  

 

The 2019 vintage data from version 8.0 of the LEHD-LODES Data are specifically pulled from two primary tables: Original-Destinations (OD) (used to determine where people live who have jobs in the various employment centers), and Workplace Area Characteristics (WAC) (used to determine the demographic characteristics of the people with jobs in the employment centers). It should be noted that these data (1) contain only wage and salary jobs (and exclude self-employed individuals); (2) do not include military and other security-related federal agencies, postal workers, some employees at nonprofits and religious institutions, and informal workers; and (3) only include an individual’s primary job if an individual has more than one job.  

 

Using the SANDAG 2023 Remote Work Survey, the percentage of employees for which telework option is available (defined as employees offered the ability to work from home at least one day per week) was derived. This percentage was calculated by industry and business size groups. The telework percentages derived from the survey were then applied to the employee counts by industry by size to estimate the percentage of employees with the option to telework for all employment centers.   

In addition, this InfoBits captures highlights of remote work in the San Diego region post-pandemic. 

 

At the bottom of Employment Centers 2.0 pages, there is a “Data Download” section. By clicking on the three dots, you can find the “Export Data” option in the upper right corner of the screen. The default export format is CSV. For most users, this default setting will be sufficient if they want to open the data in Excel. However, users can choose from other formats in addition to CSV.  

 

For any questions about Employment Centers 2.0 on the SANDAG Open Data Portal, please email data@sandag.org , and your question will be directed to the appropriate department.