MapPorn
Economic Activity in the US
Discussion
Atlanta’s metro is huge
Atlanta has some of the most extensive suburban sprawl you’ll ever see.
I think Houston and Los Angeles would be worse, but Atlanta is quite possibly the worst east of the Mississippi River.
At least Atlanta has a whole fuck ton of forest and trees in between and throughout the sprawl. Really makes it not as environmentally unhealthy.
Georgia has good laws about how subdivisions need to be developed regarding preservation of certain trees, planting new ones, and some other stuff. When I lived in Texas they would literally raze the earth down to the limestone for miles. So yeah I’ll take the sprawl here over DFW, San Antonio, Houston, or Austin.
I’m a native Houstonian and have lived there for 33 years and have seen so many pretty green spaces flattened for shitty strip malls, “luxury” apartments and cookie cutter neighborhoods. It’s disgusting
I was trying to find something on Google Maps a few months ago, since I grew up in Houston and moved away almost 30 years ago... I was saying, "well, there was a little forest behind all the houses, so I just need to scroll down 45 until I find it" - eventually I realized what I remembered as an open field with a line of tall, beautiful trees was now a massive concrete waste of parking lots and strip malls, not a bit of green left.
Yep. All the forests and drainage ponds I used to ride dirt bikes on have a fucking car wash and a TJ maxx on them.
They're "fixing" that by bulldozing it for Cop City
Los Angeles is actually the least-sprawling large urban area in the country. By area, it's slightly smaller than Houston, and only 64% the size of Atlanta, but it has more than twice the population of either of those two.
it only got its reputation because it was one of the first, fastest, and biggest suburbanizing metros in the mid-20th century, epitomizing the "car culture" of the time, and its downtown core was not as large or dense as New York and Chicago.
The three densest urban areas in the United States are Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, San Francisco-Oakland, and San Jose. New York is 5th - obviously the city itself is extremely dense, but the suburban areas of New Jersey and Long Island are much less dense.
Atlanta here. What makes it miserable are the roads. A 5 mile drive can take 30 minutes. There aren’t direct routes to where you want to go.
I came from the midwest where everything is laid out in a grid.
but Atlanta is quite possibly the worst
east of the Mississippi River.
...And, fixed.
I think Atlanta has the longest commute times in the US, but Houston's urban sprawl is undeniably worse. Houston's metro is 9444 square km, while Atlanta's is 8376, and Houston has around a million or so more people.
The area claimed as “Houston metro” seems to have topped 10,000 square miles (26,000 km2). Bigger than the entire states of New Jersey or Massachusetts, though both of those states have bigger populations with large areas still rural.
The Houston sprawl (plus the Dallas and Phoenix sprawls) are really incredible.
Houston has four(?) full/partial ring bypasses around the city. They just keep building another one to go around the traffic bullshit they create. I wouldn't be surprised if Beaumont and Houston just end up being a single metro area in the not-too-distant future.
"Why does Houston, the larger metro, not simply eat the smaller ones?"
Well, lots of people do consider that whole stretch from Washington all the way up to Boston to be one megalopolis, so it wouldn't be surprising if Houston and Beaumont spread out enough to eventually join (even if the Census bureau still considers them separate).
Sadly for these cities, most of the population live so sparsely that mass transit isn’t really viable.
Houston the city (not the metro) is only about 3,600 per square mile, barely above the estimated low end needed to reasonably support just occasional busses.
Atlanta has MARTA, which does both trains (though just in each of the four cardinal directions and not much else) and buses, but apparently it's a mostly-terrible system. Houston doesn't seem to have much of anything, while Los Angeles has a Metro system that's pretty fucking horrible (I've been once, used it, hated it).
Yep, when I first moved to Houston (Pasadena), 610 was the loop and beltway 8 was just a few disconnected segments. They didn't really get going building it until the toll bridge was done.
It looks like you also have 6, which is partial and then 99, which goes all the way around the metro.
Man our commute is fucked. One of my coworkers asked me today how far I lived from our local office and I said, "about 45 minutes to an hour, so about 15 miles."
It seems like most of the population lives north of the city, so it's just a bajillion people driving from Marietta, Sandy Springs, and Dunwoody down into the city and then taking the one major route back to each of those areas every day.
I've been to Atlanta several times and that's at least how it looked from an outsider's perspective (and I have a couple of random friends on Facebook that live north of the city themselves, so maybe it's just confirmation bias)
It's second only to New York–Jersey City–Newark: 2,553.05 mi2 vs 3,248.12 mi2.
Atlanta's contiguous urban area is the second largest by area in the U.S. but ninth in population. Has the lowest density among the top 29 most populated urban areas.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas
It is very spread out; not really any physical constraints to sprawling out indefinitely. Very car dependent city infrastructure, not a lot of density in the core.
Car-dependent because our public transportation is a fucking joke. The surrounding counties are full of racist NIMBYs.
MARTA is actually really underrated. White people are just scared of it and listen to podcasts about cars bad on their commute to work. Not saying this is you but you sound like everyone I know in the city.
That’s who i meant by the racist nimbys, yes.
Marta is fucking great. Don’t get me wrong. But there aren’t enough stations or tracks throughout the city. And it doesn’t connect to Cobb at all, and doesn’t connect in any meaningful way to Gwinnett, West Midtown, Atlantic Station, EAV, or even South Atlanta.
Sure, you can uber or grab a scooter/bike, but they’re much more expensive than taking the train. And the buses sit in traffic with the other 7.4 trillion people sitting in traffic. There are tons of proposals and ideas floating around that would make MARTA more accessible and useful. But the surrounding areas are full of suburbanites that are afraid of black people.
Helps it be the city with the most tree coverage in the country
The city proper is like 35th overall in population but the metro is top 10
This not really showing population. LA has a much larger city and metro population than Atlanta, but this map doesn’t reflect that.
When you fly over Atlanta it looks like a forest with downtown sticking out of it. LA is a huge city with city-like sprawl extending miles to the next counties.
We also have around 55% of the state's population
I’m sure the agriculture industry of the blue area is attributed to the red area as well. Because that’s where the people are buying the food and goods. Where the sales are.
Agriculture is absolutely massive and almost everything not synthetic or mined leads back to it. Everything from like glue to lumber to clothing
A lot of the cities that aren't red are also vital transport hubs that help get the stuff to those places.
Y'all are missing it. It's not about the farms, it's not about the transportation. It's about the banks.
Everyone in those rural parts of the country who do the transportation who have their own companies who farm the produce go at the end of the day and put their money into their closest bank, that has headquarters in one of these orange dots.
That's why Charlotte's on there. There's really no other reason Charlotte would be on there except for the fact that it is headquarters to Truist and Bank of America, has a large presence for Wells Fargo, TIAA, etc etc.
I was referring to bigger cities like Memphis, Nashville, and Indianapolis that aren't on here - not necessarily rural areas. Memphis for example is headquarters to FedEx. Trains, barges from the river, tractor trailers, and planes all converge there.
I see your point though. I was just adding on to the comment I replied to, a lot of these cities are still critical regardless of GDP.
Charlotte is a massive economic center even outside of banking. There's a ton of industrial money in the city from Lowes, Ingersoll Rand, Honewell, BASF, etc, there's automotive money coming in from the Concord region, there's tech money from Microsoft and AvidXChange and entertainment money from Red Ventures, etc. The banks are why it's so big now, but it has a lot more going on than it did back in the 80s and 90s.
Red Ventures doesn't put that much back into the community. Other places like Credit Karma, Sage, Ally, Lending Tree, and a few others dwarf them. Most of it goes into the CEO and his famous investor friends pockets. An engineer at Credit Karma makes 2-4x what an engineer at the same level makes at RV.
Source: I worked there as an engineer and they mostly hire engineers and writers. The pay is shit across the board, even at the director level. Lowes and Honeywell pay a little worse but they are massive in comparison with probably a 10:1 employee ratio just in the area.
Sorry, why did you both say red when it's clearly orange? Did I just find out I'm colourblind or what?
I see orange too I just didn't feel like it was worth correcting them and red is less to type lol
No, it’s definitely orange. I think people are just very used to using red and blue for obvious reasons.
Is this chart really using red instead of orange? If so, this would be an odd way to find out I'm colorblind.
The offices of the corporations that run the farms are usually in cities, too.
97% of u.s. farms and 89% of u.s. farmland is owned by individual families, not by corporations.
They own the land (and therefore the liability) but it's pretty common for the produce and livestock to be contracted exclusively to one of few buyers.
From a 2021 USDA news release that came up first when I looked up if your percentage was about accurate:
The data show that small family farms, those farms with a GCFI of less than $350,000 per year, account for 88% of all U.S. farms, 46% of total land in farms, and 19% of the value of all agricultural products sold. Large-scale family farms (GCFI of $1 million or more) make up less than 3% of all U.S. farms but produce 43% of the value of all agricultural products. Mid-size farms (GCFI between $350,000 and $999,999) are 5% of U.S. farms and produce 20% of the value of all agricultural products.
So small family farms are the largest by quantity, but they control a minority of the farmland and produce an even smaller minority of agricultural product (by sale value).
"Large family farms" produce over 40% of the agricultural product. Bill Gates alone privately owns 275,000 acres of farmland across 17 states. That makes him an example of what a "large family farm" can describe.
Also, owning the land is not mutually exclusive to farming for a corporation. You can own the land (and thereby the entire liability for a bad year) while having an exclusive contract to sell all of your products to Seedy Monopoly. LLC or Amalgamated Pork Belly Cartel Co., which gives them a significant share of your possible margin. This arrangement is common.
the point isn't that farming isn't a corporate industry, it's that economic activity wouldn't be solely registered to an office in a city, because corporations don't directly own the farms.
the farms, one way or another, sell their produce or contract the use of their land to the corporations, and that is economic activity registered in a rural area, as the business address of the farm is the farm.
Lol yeah small humble farming families like the Simplots and Resnicks
In terms of percentage of GDP agriculture is less than 1% of gdp. cities have massive banks, huge tech companies, these industries absolutely dwarf, agricultural industries. The service industry makes up 80% of United States GDP.
I’m sure the agriculture industry of the blue area is attributed to the red area as well.
There are no red areas on the map, only orange and blue. You may have red-green colour blindness.
I am colorblind haha I was so confident this time 🥲
This is definitely less than half of the population
I was told we were building those skyscrapers to vibe in wtf
That's because this isn't population but money spent.
A lot of these areas are tourist destinations in addition to being where people live. People traveling to them spend money.
Tourism accounts for just 3% of US GDP. Even if it’s going disproportionately to all of the orange metro areas, it’s not making that much of a difference.
Also I don't think the tourism spending is so dramatically concentrated in the orange areas. Lots of people vacation at resorts and lakes and beaches and random places in the blue areas. All of Hawaii is in the blue. Orlando is in the blue.
That’s because there is extremely high inequality of productivity. A person working retail in an Apple Store is far higher productivity than the same person working retail in a dress shop in the middle of nowhere
There are other cities that are not included in this map. It does not just show cities, but specifically those with strong economic activity.
It isn’t just strong activity. It is specific activity to hit 50/50.
St. Louis and Portland are included, but they have a lower gdp than Austin and Tampa, for example. So it seems some cities were left on the blue side to balance it, or for some other reason
St Louis coming in by surprise. I was expecting Salt Lake City or Nashville.
STL, Detroit, and Pittsburgh still have a lot going on. And then GDP production from those regions is still higher than average. The narrative is that they are dying, but that's when compared to their peak. All three are still top 25 populations.
I was surprised not to see Cleveland on there. Lot of healthcare and airline business there.
Same. I'm confused by the lack of Cleveland/ anything in Ohio. Seems like they should make it before Portland... I'm surprised Orlando or Las Vegas didn't sneak onto this list. Seems like the 2 tourists' heavy econs would get at least one on this list...
Well, this map is just a random collection of urban areas that add up to 50% of the US' GDP, not the "largest MSAs by GDP", so it's kind of a meaningless metric. SLC's MSA does actually have a larger GDP than St. Louis, for reference.
Was curious so I looked it up, and STL is bigger than both.
Not sure where you got your data.
The actual full page for each city has different numbers for some reason.
Wikipedia's not perfect!
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NGMP41620
So why not just check the actual sources?
The FED says salt lake city doesn't even break $200 billion.
Ah, the number on Wiki includes SLC, Provo, and Ogden as one number. Which gets into the minutae of how we define MSAs vs CSAs and urban areas. Statistics are messy and can basically tell whatever story you want.
While you're right in that it's not just the largest MSAs by GDP, STL actually has a larger GDP than SLC and Nashville.
Yea, it made me wonder why Pittsburg was included instead of columbus, or sacramento being excluded
As a packaging technician, there is a lot of business in STL. Have to travel there often for suppliers.
This map is basically the 20 largest metros by GDP, plus a few others that I’m guessing get the total to approximately 50%.
For example, the Austin metro is 22nd in GDP and was not included, but the Pittsburgh metro, which is 30th in GDP, was included.
STL has a massive Boeing facility
News flash: gdp is the highest where large corporations are headquartered.
Doesn't even need to be that deep, all those are are just major cities.
If it were true Vegas would be there. It's like why I don't like my fellow Californians saying 4th largest economy, like my brother we're not Nvidia and apple, that's them.
The goal of the map is 50% of the economy. If we start including Vegas, and Nashville and other major cities we start getting more than 50%.
70% of the countries economy comes from metro areas.
It is completely true. They just didn't need Vegas, Austin, or tons of other metro areas to get to a 50/50 map. If they included all cities, the map wouldn't look too much different but it would be more like 80/20.
Population density map of the USA: https://ecpmlangues.unistra.fr/civilization/geography/map-us-population-density-2021
😮 has someone looked in to why these are so closely related?!?
Guys, over here quick!!!! I think someone might be on to something here!
And products often move through city centres
Ohio is the largest state not having any orange here.
Well maybe in population, but Alaska is a lot larger...
Why Pittsburgh over CLE or Columbus is beyond me other than pushing the numbers over 50%
Maybe due to Pittsburgh having a bigger economy.
The chart is misleading. You could subtract from the OJ in one section and add to others an it would still be "correct."
I think it's important to realize economic activity isn't the same as worth. The open spaces of the United States are very important and even hillbillies can be stewards of this great country and nature. The difficult part is getting rural voters to realize this and act more..... honorably and for city dwellers to realize cities are not an island, but rather a hub for the greater area and both spaces rely on each other for resources and cultural benefit
We all know that the blue states make the majority of federal dollars! Donor states….
highly concentrated areas where the productivity of the other zone is exploited and money manipulated
This makes it seem as if one part could produce what it does without the other and even international production.
Obviously they don't. They create this value but it is only possible with the other...
Also yeah people live in cities.
I find this hard to believe given the fact that 6 cities make up 70% of the US GDP.
It is so wild to not see New Orleans and Baton Rouge on that list anymore. How far Louisiana has fallen in such a short time.
Now do one for resources and materials
GDP is a very flawed metric
This kind of map is interesting, but can make people think the orange areas are more important than the blue areas.
That would be a mistake.
If you have one person selling insurance and their company makes $100 million dollars, and you have 100 farmers each selling $1 million in food, which is more important?
Without the insurance company paying people to sell their insurance across the state, nobody could afford to buy the farmer's food, but without the farmer's food the people would be starving and unable to go to work and sell insurance.
Both depend on the other and are thus critical to a healthy symbiotic relationship.
Of course, this is a very simplified example, but it is merely a tool to illustrate a point.
Yeah this map does the rounds on facebook every once in a while and the comments are always "lets see where the food comes from" or "how would orange eat without blue".
I don't think either would be as successful without the other. How would the blue areas make all that food without the people in the orange areas inventing the internal combustion engine, or having the population to buy the food.
If someone's takeaway from the map is that the orange area is more important than the blue, I don't think they have great critical thinking skills. I see the map as starting a conversation about what goes on where in the country, and how different areas have different economic drivers and different needs.
There are many successful city states that produce relatively little agriculture.
Singapore, Monaco, Hong Kong (kinda), Liechtenstein, etc.
There are few countries that are wealthy and rely heavily on agriculture.
After WWII, U.S. cities became hubs for finance, tech, and education due to massive federal investments (like the GI Bill and interstate highways), while rural areas were left out of this economic transformation. That legacy still shapes the GDP divide today.
Every country in the world looks like this. In modern life, economic production is centered in cities.
How was the rest of America left out of the gi bill or interstate highways?
Where exactly do you think new roads would have to have gone to not have the divide you’re referencing.
What city is the orange spot between Detroit and the north east corridor?
Pittsburgh?
Didn't know Pittsburgh has such a big economic output. I couldn't tell if it was Pittsburgh, Columbus or Cleveland
Pittsburgh was a top 8 (maybe 5) economy in the middle twentieth century. It was definitely number 3 in Fortune 500 companies not very long ago (into the 80s I believe and I am certain the 70s). Only behind NYC and Chicago. I bet there are few who realize how influential of a city it was.
keep in mind that pennsylvania is very long. also pittsburgh is full of steel factories
Well not full. There’s like 2-3 mills left. Modern Pittsburgh has huge tech, education, and medicine industries, as well as headquartering major companies like PNC and PPG
Steel has been largely gone for 40+ years.
What does Denver do?
What cities are these areas?
seattle portland sf la san diego phoenix denver minneapolis chicago st louis detroit pittsburgh boston new york philadelphia dc charlotte atlanta dallas houston miami
Hey nice I’m part of the 50%
A map of why housing is expensive
Denver there holding up the entire middle by itself.
Good thing corn votes to keep the GDP generating areas in check
This just in: The places with the most people have the most economic activity! More news at 11
Don't know if I trust this map. Some very weird exclusions like Tampa and Hampton Roads areas I would certainly assume would be in in the top 50%. But then showing Pittsburgh as one but not Columbus or Cleveland area?
Proud to be a part of the 50%
I'll try to name all the orange dots as a non-American: - Seattle - Portland - San Francisco / Bay Area - Los Angeles - San Diego - Phoenix - Denver - Dallas-Fort Worth? - Houston - Minneapolis - St Louis? - Chicago - Detroit - Atlanta - Columbus? (correct ans: Pittsburgh) - ??? (northeast of Atlanta) (correct ans: Charlotte) - Miami - DC & surrounds? (correct ans: DC & Baltimore) - Baltimore? (correct ans: Philadelphia) - NYC & surrounds - Boston
Edit: noted the correct answers after checking a map. Got 17/21 right!
There’s a financial phenomenon that partially explains the discrepancy. Money made elsewhere can be spent from (i.e. loans and direct deposits) and saved to (i.e. banks) from other places that have their financial institutions headquartered in other areas. 401ks and stock purchases are included in this, so this map doesn’t exactly paint the entire picture.
It'd be helpful to add all of the major cities to this.
California alone is a little over 14% of the entire US GDP.
One state.
Internationally, California would be level with Japan and Germany.
Why nobody in California ever thought to get rid of those other 49 states baffles me
Don’t threaten us with a good time!
You'd also take America's wealthiest oligarchs with you to control your government instead of the rest of America's government.
Thiel, Zuckerberg and Bezos could run a techno theocracy in California, especially since it would be founded on the basis and merit of economic production, that culture would probably be ingrained into the new country. You have more value the more you produce.
NJ FTW!
Now do the food and energy production that makes this economic activity possible!
(California flexes.)
What about the R&D that made modern food and energy production possible?
Most of that energy production would be clustered around those orange areas
How about we just show how much blue states send out federal tax dollars to red states to subsidize their lack of economy?
Now do Canada
No one has money in Ohio
Not wrong but how much GDP would the orange areas be capable of producing without the raw materials and food produced in the blue areas?
Food is cheap but we can't live without it and manufactured goods are more expensive than the raw materials they're made from but still require them
I'm guessing the orange splotch in the middle of the Louisiana Purchase is Walmart HQ?
People live in cities.
Oh wow, people live in cities!
Now compare this to population
Does governemnt spending count as economic activity? If it does what does this look like if you take DC and parts of Virginia out and the MIC HQs.
What type of economic activity? Is land value included in the calculations? California is the 4th largest economy in the world, and you can't tell me its just because of LA and the Bay Area.
This is incredible.
Areas in blue have most of the agriculture, raw materials, and fresh water.
I know where I'd rather be living.
Reddit: Capitalism is the devil and responsible for most evils
Also Reddit: Hurr hurr look at how the areas that have all the banks, insurance companies, media, investment firms and so on out earn all those forests and mountains
My biggest takeaway from the comments is that people have a really hard time looking at maps and understanding what the data means.
United cities of america.
None of those places producing ‘economic activity’ produce food. And without food….
The commodities grown in the blue areas are sold in the red areas.
This doesn’t mean anything sensible. The blue areas have a ton of economic value.
Now tell me how those orange areas feed themselves
Seaports....Airports...
Flyover country 😄
I can believe it.
If you split the blue area in half its still going to be all large metros on one side....
Now show where the food comes from!
This map means nothing.
I’d like to know the total populations of the two colors too
Looking at the populations of the top 20 metros and rounding to the nearest mil, it's around 125m
So according to my calculations those 125M have a gdp per capita of $120K while the other 222M have a gdp per capita of $68K (whole USA gdp per capita is $89K btw)
One interesting aspect: how many of those 125M and 222M have an actual zero or net negative contribution to GDP?
Edit to say: no such thing as negative GDP "contribution" - it's a silly metric that way.
I’m doing my part to bring gdp down, arguing with people online to distract them from being productive
We all produce something scrolling reddit
Im increaseing Reddit shareholder value more ads please
You are the product when scrolling Reddit. Sold to advertisers.
The definition of productive is a very slippery thing.
If i pay you 5 dollars to punch me in the balls, then you pay me 5 dollars to punch you in the balls, then we added 10 dollars to the gdp.
Only if you hired each other legally, declared said income, etc.
Well, of course, Uncle sam needs their six dollars in taxes.
Sounds like he is being very productive.........wait
Is this actually possible?
Well, how much does a newborn contribute, directly through their labors, to GDP?
There's an economic development strategy worthy of Project 2025: deport the children! They're obviously detrimental to our economy! (China was doing this with their female babies during One-Child...)
That's not how GDP works, parents and government spending on babies would contribute to gdp
0%, obviously.
But does that make it negative?
it's not possible to have a negative contribution to GDP and only a hermit who never spent a cent and never was provided anything would have zero GDP contribution.
So one in three americans reading this also live in the orange?
I wouldn't doubt it, there's a lot of empty space in the middle and the west, and the orange urban areas have significantly higher population density than the rest of the areas.
Just look at a population density map like this one, all the bumps are essentially urban areas.
Edit: and the eastern half is very heavily forested, and the west up until the west edge of the Rockies is mostly plains and flatlands, with exceptions of course. The Rockies create a massive rain shadow to the east, and much of the plains in the center were a sea millions of years ago, so the soil is very shallow with hard clay a very short distance under the surface, where east of the Mississippi there is deeper soil.
The Appalachians and its foothills are insanely green compared to the center of the country and the Rockies. Like forest threatening to spill over onto the highway like some great living mass green.
I don't know how they built the map, but the orange areas aren't entire metropolitan areas or anything I recognize. The areas over LA, San Diego, Phoenix, Denver - they don't match the city or the county or the metro area, they're just shaped wrong. Maybe they're using zip codes with the highest economic outputs?
Regardless, the population is going to be a lot smaller than 125 because it's not using entire metropolitan areas.
The orange areas are Urban Areas (UAs). Stupid name, I know. UAs make up the core of Metropolitan Statistical Areas.
From Wikipedia:
Good catch. The one in Arizona does seem to match the shape of the official "Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale Urban Area".
Same with the SF-SJ-Oakland Metro, it’s missing half the Bay Area practically
Yeah I wonder how this map is drawn, because it's not by county or MSA, which is usually how these are calculated. It looks like it might be down to census tract, which is insane
r/peopleliveincities
People don't always live in the same area that they work though. I work in an orange area, but live in the blue
I am feeding that data into the computer and triangulating your position as we speak.
enhance
True. A lot of major cities on the east coast have their population “day time population” due to this daily fluctuation.
I work from home in a blue area, but my corporate offices are in an orange area... this map would seem to count just those offices and not the satellite offices near my home.
So you generate value in the orange area and spend it in a blue area. The orange area is still responsible for the economic activity there.
Yes, but to the comment that I was replying to, that won't be reflected correctly looking at population.
It's often the opposite. I live in Calgary, a huge part of our gdp is oil and agriculture.
Obviously there is no oil and agriculture in the city. It's just a headquarter and the place things get sold.
There is the value of raw oil, but then the value added by refining, then the profit margin through corporate administration. Houston is on this map for the US. Crude is 68 dollars per barrel on the wholesale market while gasoline is 240$ for a barrel. So most of the value of the finished product can be attributed to the transport and refinement.
“Often” is doing a lot of work here. Yes there are scenarios where people leave the city to do business. But many many more are entering the city to do work.