I was going to write an update about the July 25 interim committee hearing on the fight between rural electric cooperatives and municipal electric providers, but then I got distracted by this little statistical morsel about the labor market in Brookings amidst the wheezing and whining from the Brookings Economic Development Corporation:
It strikes me as remarkable that 57.2% of the people working in Brookings drive from out of town to get to work. When over half of a city’s workforce comes from elsewhere, that suggests a number of things about the community:
- The town is a regional hub for employment.
- Housing is unable to keep up with job growth.
- There are opportunities to make money, but many workers find it cheaper or more convenient to live somewhere else.
- Commerce could take a bigger hit from bad weather, bad roads, and high gas prices than other towns might experience with a more local workforce.
I don’t have a full analysis to how true those conclusions might be in Brookings, but I can certainly rush off to the nice little app cited by the BEDC, the Census Bureau’s “On the Map,” grab similar data for 47 major South Dakota towns, and tell you who the commutingest towns are (according to 2015 data):
Brookings is an interesting anomaly in commuting patterns. Most towns with high percentages of commuters in also have high percentages of commuters out. Brookings is the only town I sampled that draws a majority of its daily workforce from out of town but which sees less than 40% of its resident labor force hit the road for work. I found only four other major towns—Madison, Hot Springs, Yankton, and Winner—where a majority of daily workers are from out of town and a majority of resident workers work in town.
Only seven towns on this list get a majority of their workers from in town and provide enough jobs to keep a majority of their residents from driving elsewhere for work: Sioux Falls, Rapid City, Aberdeen, Pierre, Watertown, Mitchell, and Huron. Sioux Falls has both the lowest percentage of workers commuting in—37%—and the lowest percentage commuting out—17%. But in raw numbers, over 47,000 people drive into Sioux Falls for work each day, and 15,600 drive out for work. That’s like trucking every worker who lives in Brookings, Mitchell, Watertown, and Aberdeen down to Sioux Falls to work and at the same time shipping out a workforce equal to Huron and Pierre. Just the commuting in and out of Sioux Falls each day is equal to the working population of six major South Dakota towns.
Rapid City has higher percentages than Sioux Falls in both categories. 45% of Rapid’s workforce comes from outside its city limits, over 22,000 workers. 24% of Rapid’s resident worker population, 8,320, hits the road each day for work.
Interestingly, our third largest town, Aberdeen, does not draw the third largest number of commuters. Over 6,700 people come to the Hub City for work—about 38% of Aberdeen’s workforce, close to the commuting-in percentage for Sioux Falls—but Brookings draws 9,129 workers, 57% of its workforce.
Bedroom communities have far more commuters out than commuters in. In Tea, Summerset, Lead, Dell Rapids, Harrisburg, and Hartford, the number of residents who leave town for work each day is more than twice as large than the total number of people who work in town. But in Pine Ridge, that ratio is 6.7—for every one person who has a job in Pine Ridge, there are nearly seven Pine Ridge residents who go elsewhere for work.
In addition to those seven top bedroom communities, the following towns all see over three quarters of their working residents go out of town for work: Edgemont, Lennox, Hill City, Mission, Groton, Brandon, Dell Rapids, Fort Pierre, Salem, North Sioux City, Beresford, Canton, and Deadwood.
Every one of those bedroom communities is also imports the majority of its labor. As I mentioned above, having workers commuting out correlates pretty strongly with having workers commuting in… a phenomenon that a socialist might criticize as gross inefficiency but that a capitalist might praise as a sign of diverse opportunity.
Consider Webster, where the ratio of commuters in to commuters out is 1.02, the closest to 1.00 on my list of 45 towns. Each day (well, roughly speaking—shifts vary, of course), 506 workers drive in on US 12 or SD 25 to work at A&W and Mike’s and the Bethesda Home. They meet 496 Webster residents heading out to Agtegra or Waubay or who knows where else for work. If Webster built a wall, refused to hire anyone from out of town, and required residents to work in town, Webster could fill every job currently held by a daily immigrant with a current daily emigrant. The towns around who would lose their current Webster workers could hire up almost all of the commuters who were kicked out of Webster, leaving only ten people, 1% of the current daily Webster churn, in the lurch.
Assume that currently, those thousand people driving in and out of Webster each for work each burn up an average of two gallons of gasoline on their commute. Over one work year, reassigning those people to jobs that didn’t require a commute would save 500,000 gallons of gasoline. Guess an average commute time of 50 minutes round trip, and local reassignment would save those thousand workers over 208,000 hours, the equivalent of 104 full-time work-years (or 208,000 nice sit-down meals with families, whichever you prioritize).
A socialist would wonder why the heck we let people waste all that fuel and time instead of assigning them to live closest to the jobs that suit their skills… or why we at least don’t ban cars and build reliable, efficient train service like we used to have a hundred years ago. A capitalist would say nuts to that: individual workers are much better able to determine where their skills can add optimum value and earn optimum pay when they ahve their own cars and can decide just how much time and gasoline they are willing to sacrifice to find their labor niche and paycheck.
Of course, for efficiency’s sake, socialists would likely also have to promote large towns over small towns. Only seven towns on this list get a majority of their workers from in town and provide enough jobs to keep a majority of their residents from driving elsewhere for work: Sioux Falls, Rapid City, Aberdeen, Pierre, Watertown, Mitchell, and Huron.
If I didn’t include your favorite town on the list, punch that town into the Census mapper and see how it compares for commuting in and out!
What is the criteria for a “bedroom community”?
It looks like location is fairly critical too.
Bedroom communities would be like Brandon, Canton, Dell Rapids. I wish companies like Daktronics, 3M etc would build their plants in Sioux Falls. It’s okay having one or two in those smaller communities but the best for the economy would be to have a larger hub in Sioux Falls initially. Manufacturing lacks in Sioux Falls.
I don’t mind having Daktronics and 3M in Brookings, thank you very much.
Thank you for the examples Steve.
I’m still wondering what the criteria is. What makes Lead a bedroom community? Is Groton a bedroom community? Why? Wolsey?
Debbo, I’ll bet there are some formal Census or sociological definitions of “bedroom community.” In general, I think of bedroom communities as places where people spend their nights but not their workdays, meaning those towns have lots of houses but not a lot of businesses of their own.
Steve gives three interesting examples. I’m tempted to say Brandon is more of a bedoroom community than Dell Rapids and Canton. The farther two towns, I speculate, maintain a bit more of their own identity… although I would welcome observations from closer up. To what extent do the the folks there consider themselves residents of Sioux Falls? How many of their kids go to their local schools, and how many open-enroll into Sioux Falls?
I wonder about the other direction, school-wise: what about the big town kids who open-enroll out to the bedroom communities’ schools? With which town do those kids identify, the place they sleep and spend their weekends, or the school where they study and play ball?
Commuting for work or school seems to disrupt one’s sense of community… or at least that’s the feeling I got when I lived in the Madison metro area but worked in Montrose. (In my subsequent wanderings, adopting the broader concept of the entire state as my community helped alleviate that sense of split placement.)
What I’m getting at, Debbo, is that if I were writing a book on bedroom communities, I’d look not just at commuting patterns but residents’ deep sense of identity and place. I’d start by asking residents, “Where are you from?” and marking down how many say, “I’m from Town X!” with enthusiasm, how many say, “I bunk in Town X, but my life revolves around Town Y,” and how many seem a little confused by the question—”Well, I live here in Town X, but I work in Town Y, so I’m kinda not sure if I can say I’m from one place or another.”
Another interesting test would be to give each resident a housing voucher for $300,000 and say, “Go ahead, upgrade your living situation.” How many would stay and renovate their current house? How many would buy a new house in the same town? And how many would move to some other place they’d rather be? I know, wholly impractical survey instrument, but the percentages who’d take each option might help define “bedroom community.”
I agree with you about an official definition Cory, and about people’s habits and sense of place.
I don’t see Lead as a bedroom community, but I suppose you’re thinking to Deadwood? I wonder if RC is surrounded by more bedroom communities than anywhere else in SD due to its isolation? Somerset, Black Hawk, Rapid Valley, Countryside, Box Elder, Sturgis, Newell, Whitewood, Piedmont, Rockerville, Johnson Siding, Keystone, Hisega, Hermosa, New Underwood, Pine Hills, …….?
BTW, I’ll take your $300,000 test. Give me the money and I’ll tell you where I will use it.
Steve, does Sioux Falls need more manufacturing? Sioux Falls already seems to have all the economic growth and diversity it needs. Would more manufacturing fill some gap?
The Census last counted manufacturing data for SD towns in 2012. Of our nine biggest towns (not counting Pierre, for which Census didn’t offer data, and which doesn’t have much manufacturing anyway), SF had the largest number of employees in manufacturing… but manufacturing employees made up about 6% of SF’s population and about 20% of Brookings’s.
SF had 7,400 production workers averaging $36.9K a year in wages. Brookings had 2,200 production workers averaging $43.4K. In Mitchell, production workers averaged $46.7K. Spearfish beat SF’s production wage, at $37.3K. The other five towns paid less than SF.
So I’m curious: in what ways would it be better for the economy if no other large manufacturers located in Brookings. Should all manufacturing from here on out be agglomerated in Sioux Falls? Should all other towns be denied that avenue of growth? Does the logic extend backward and say that Brookings never should have recruited 3M, or that Al Kurtenbach should have built Daktronics in SF?
Debbo, 86%+ of Lead’s resident workers drive elsewhere for work. That means a lot of Leadians don’t spend the day in Lead.
I agree, though: Lead is not a bedroom community in the same way that all those other housing developments are. Heck, Lead has a pretty good grocery store of its own.
Of course, the Black Hills are an interesting sociological and geographical case. When I lived in Spearfish, I got the impression the whole area was more economically and culturally integrated than southeast SD. Spearfish, Belle Fourche, Sturgis, and Lead-Deadwood sometimes felt like one big micro-metro area with people going back and forth for work and other things more than could be said of any circle of comparable towns in East River.
I agree with you about Spearfish, Belle Fourche, Sturgis, and Lead-Deadwood. Wow. 86% of Leadites, or whatever they call themselves, work elsewhere. That’s huge, but I guess with no gold mine, there are no jobs.