A city’s personality is shaped by geography, major employers, ethnic diversity, and cultural touchstones, all of which are reflected in local architecture.
A city’s architecture, shaped by designers, contractors, and builders, encapsulates its unique character and reflects broader economic and cultural influences.
Migration is driven by the cost of living and lifestyle, which tech hubs like Seattle and Austin lead.
Geographers, topographers, demographers, and owners of pro-league sports teams know a simple but fun fact: cities have personalities.
The mannerisms and mindsets that define a city’s personality derive from various sources, with location near the top of the list. For instance, does the city have a mountain backdrop, lie along a historical river trading route, or perhaps it’s a port for ocean-going or Great Lakes-bound cargo traffic?
Another often-related key determinant of a city’s nature is who the major employers are in the urban population. Is it a government town, an academic haven, a high-tech hub, a financial center, or a manufacturing nexus?
Also crucial to understanding a city’s quirks and/or finer points is an appreciation for its ethnic diversity, consisting of the current make-up, plus knowing what drove specific inward-flowing population streams in the past.
There are also cultural touchstones, with one city’s symphony orchestra, opera company, or performing arts center lauded over others. Or one city’s athletic champions, sometimes even perpetual also-rans, engender a sustaining and unique pride in a particular place.
What’s important from the foregoing for construction is that all these factors are subtly or overtly, and sometimes grandly, encapsulated in a city’s architecture.
No architecture lacks designers, contractors, building product manufacturers, and on-site workers. Many of these underlying forces affect economic growth, or the lack thereof, and construction in America’s major cities.
We’ll begin with the year-over-year percentage-change figures on construction employment as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Construction jobs data for all the big urban centers in California are down year-over-year (YoY), with Riverside humbled the most, falling 5.1%. Los Angeles and Oakland followed this in a tie (both down 3.4%), San Francisco (down 2.3%), San Diego (lost 0.7%), and San Jose (dropped 0.6%).
The major cities in Florida present quite a contrast with those in California. The number of construction jobs is up 3.8% YoY in Jacksonville, up 3.0% in Tampa, up 2.9% in Orlando (was close to up 5.0% YoY, mid-2022 to end of 2024), and added 2.4% in Miami (falling from up 5.0% mid-2022 to mid-2024).
Other cities with notable YoY gains in ‘hard hat’ employment at present are: Oklahoma City, up 6.9%; Washington, D.C., up 6.4%; Kansas City, up 4.9%; Charlotte, up 3.0% (was up 4.0% to up 6.0% all the way through 2021, 2022, and 2023); San Antonio, up 2.5% (was up 8.0% in November-December, 2023); and Phoenix, up 1.1% (was up 10.0% from mid-2022 to early 2024).
Nashville may be down 2.6% now, but it was up 5.0% to 10.0% during much of the past decade.
Ohio’s cities also warrant mention for their strong-to-decent performances: Cincinnati, up 9.2% YoY; Columbus, up 2.5% (it was over 10.0% in the second half of 2024); and Cleveland, up 1.5%.
What have been some of the influences driving these statistics?
PODS, the company that makes portable storage containers, publishes an annual Moving Trends report. Overcrowding, the high cost of living, and big jumps in insurance coverage premiums are cited as reasons people move out of places such as Los Angeles, northern California, Long Island, Central Jersey, Chicago, and Boston.
Move-ins as opposed to move-outs, however, are occurring in Charlotte, Raleigh, Wilmington, and Greenville-Spartanburg (all located in North or South Carolina), Nashville and Knoxville in Tennessee, and numerous locales in Florida (Jacksonville, Myrtle Beach, and Ocala). A better balancing of work-recreation lifestyles and lower living costs are incentives for move-ins.
As a sidebar on the cost-of-living subject, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) presents figures in a PDF that can be accessed online showing that the median sales price of an existing single-family home is, almost unbelievably, five times greater in San Jose than in Jacksonville.
By examining 16 criteria under the major topic areas of connectivity and green infrastructure, plus the availability of tech sector jobs, ProptechOS has assembled a Top 10 ranking of U.S. cities according to how ‘smart’ they are and how well positioned they appear to be for the future.
Due to their longstanding success in attracting high-tech startup companies and associated venture capital, it seems a given that Seattle (1st place), San Jose (4th), Boston (6th), and San Francisco (7th) would feature well on this list. The metros filling out the other six slots are Miami (2nd), Austin (3rd), Oakland (5th), New York (8th), Los Angeles (9th), and Atlanta (10th).
Austin is currently number one among the three key subset criteria for connectivity and infrastructure. Oakland and Seattle are equally matched in placing out front for green infrastructure. Atlanta is taking the leadership position in potential tech job markets, with Oakland only a half-step behind.
Adopting a broader (i.e., worldwide) perspective on strengths and weaknesses among cities, Oxford Economics has a Global Cities Index that looks at qualifiers such as economic growth, human capital, quality of life, environment, and governance. America has 19 placements among the frontrunning 50, nearly 40%.
In the Top 10, the cities located in the U.S. are New York (at number 1), San Jose, Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco. In what might be termed a next tier (i.e., rankings 11 through 50) are L.A., Washington, Dallas, Chicago, Denver, Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Diego, Phoenix, Miami, Austin, and Portland. Notice that many of these have been mentioned in preceding paragraphs.
To wrap up, consider some snippets of information on proposed or upcoming construction projects that will surely affect the personalities of the cities in which they occur.
Construction trends both shape and reflect city identities, varying across different regions. Ultimately, the built environment is a testament to the economic, social, and cultural forces driving each city’s evolution.
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