Big Cities Are Holding Back the U.S. Jobs Recovery
The shift to working from home has wiped out many service jobs. That’s made the employment picture look much worse in a few large urban areas compared with the rest of the country.
A Chicago shoe shine kiosk closed to business.
Photographer: Scott Olson/Getty Images
The U.S. unemployment rate was a seasonally adjusted 5.2% in August. In and around the country’s biggest cities, unemployment was much higher than that: 10.2% in New York City, 10.1% in Los Angeles County and 8% in the core of the Chicago metropolitan area.
A big part of what’s going on here is what was described last month in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper as the “urban and industry bias of remote work.” That is, big, dense cities employ lots of skilled knowledge workers. These people have generally kept their jobs during the pandemic, but most stopped going into the office when Covid-19 arrived and many have yet to return, with ill effects for the people who used to serve them lunch, shine their shoes, clean their suits, drive them around and so on. As the authors put it: