Big tech has made the San Francisco Bay Area, which spans the San Francisco and San José metros, the nation's second largest center of corporate headquarters with 35, compared to Chicago's 33. Indeed, the Bay Area increasingly looks like America's new "Second City," at least based on headquarters, a testament to the power of high-tech in the U.S. economy. 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.
source: "The Geography of Corporate Headquarters" by Bloomberg CityLab
source: "The Geography of Corporate Headquarters" by Bloomberg CityLab
One of the largest concentration of corporations
The Geography of Corporate Headquarters
New York
Texas
California
Illinois
Ohio
New Jersey
Virginia
Pennsylvania
Minnesota
Florida
58
50
49
37
25
22
21
20
19
18
Since the 1960s, San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area have enacted strict zoning regulations. Among other restrictions, San Francisco does not allow buildings over 40 feet tall in most of the city, and has passed laws making it easier for neighbors to block developments. Partly as a result of these codes, from 2007 to 2014, the Bay Area issued building permits for only half the number of needed houses, based on the area's population growth. At the same time, there has been rapid economic growth of the high tech industry in San Francisco and nearby Silicon Valley, which has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs. The resultant high demand for housing, combined with the lack of supply, have caused dramatic increases in rents and extremely high housing prices. For example, from 2012 to 2016, the San Francisco metropolitan area added 373,000 new jobs, but permitted only 58,000 new housing units.
source: Wikipedia
source: Wikipedia
San Francisco Bay Area housing shortage
Housing Gap
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
15 000
30 000
45 000
60 000
75 000
90 000
New housing units approved
Job growth
Ridership across the Bay Area's public transportation systems fell by 5.2 percent between 2016 and 2018, according to a study from UCLA's Institute of Transportation Studies, with the region's residents taking 27.5 million fewer transit trips per year.
That decline happened despite a booming local economy that should have led people to use public transit more. It may be driven, researchers found, by stiff competition from ride-hailing apps and a regional housing crisis that is pushing people into more car-dependent areas. The Bay Area needs to unwind that crisis to reverse its transit decline, they wrote, and make tough choices to give transit a leg up on driving.
source: "Bay Area traffic is terrible, so why are fewer people taking transit?" Times Herald
source of "Traffic is Getting Worse" diagram:
www.statistica.com
That decline happened despite a booming local economy that should have led people to use public transit more. It may be driven, researchers found, by stiff competition from ride-hailing apps and a regional housing crisis that is pushing people into more car-dependent areas. The Bay Area needs to unwind that crisis to reverse its transit decline, they wrote, and make tough choices to give transit a leg up on driving.
source: "Bay Area traffic is terrible, so why are fewer people taking transit?" Times Herald
source of "Traffic is Getting Worse" diagram:
www.statistica.com
San Francisco Bay Area traffic congestion
Traffic is Getting Worse
Los Angeles
San Francisco
Washington D.C.
New York
Boston
Seattle
1987
2017
Atlanta
66
65
49
38
40
39
29
119
103
102
92
80
78
77
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