Airports / 19 million jobs were located within 10 miles of major american airports

As our Richard Florida pointed out in a series of posts last spring, airports play a “substantial role” in the economic growth of American cities. Their ability to facilitate the movement of goods and people may influence urban development as much as highways, railroads, and seaports did in previous centuries. They may also rival nearby central cities as anchors of employment, according to new research.

This insight comes courtesy of John Kasarda, co-author of the 2011 book Aerotropolis, and his University of North Carolina colleague Stephen Appold, in a recent issue of Urban Studies. Appold and Kasarda analyzed employment patterns around the 25 largest passenger airports in the United States. They report “substantial” job concentration within 2.5 miles of these airports — about half that found within 2.5 miles of corresponding central business districts.

In 2009, about 3.1 million jobs were located within 2.5 miles of the 25 major airports, write Appold and Kasarda. Expanding out to 5 miles meant 7.5 million jobs, and expanding to 10 miles meant 19 million. Those figures represent about 3, 7, and 17 percent of all U.S. employment. Meantime wages made up even greater shares of the national average (3.4, 8, and 22 percent, respectively), “indicating that employment near the major airports is relatively well-paid.”

On any given day, an average of 26,000 people work a job that directly serves one of the top-25 airports — a figure “comparable with that in many major central business districts,” report the researchers. (Atlanta International’s 56,000 daily workers are enough to define it as a central city by Census standards.) Four of the 25 airports created enough employment within 2.5 miles to populate their own metro areas. (In the case of Las Vegas, that total nears 300,000 workers.)

The findings generalize a jobs impact near airports found in recent individual studies of metro areas. Appold and Kasarda say the trend held even for airports located a considerable distance from their corresponding city centers, suggesting they’ve become “employment clusters of their own.” About 450,000 jobs exist within 5 miles of Chicago O’Hare (14 miles from the Loop), 395,000 within that range of Dallas-Fort Worth (12 miles from the cities), and 240,000 that close to Dulles International (20 miles from Washington, D.C.).

Choosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor from

via Airports: Where the Jobs Are – Jobs & Economy – The Atlantic Cities.