Philly's CCD report on new way to count downtown jobs & people (Philadelphia: city hall)

[pman]

http://definingdowntown.org/wp-conte...townReport.pdf
while there isn't much in here directly about Pittsburgh, Philadelphia's CCD (the model for the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership) is pushing a new way to look at the number of people who live and work in and around downtowns across the country. the census bureau uses a 2 mi radius around city hall which doesn't take into account things like city hall location or water. they seem to enjoy pointing out that this puts nj in downtown NYC. at any rate, the data they do provide in the appendix is interesting. Pittsburgh has the 20th highest number of gross jobs within one mile of downtown (153k), sandwiched between dallas (167k) and the civic ctr in san francisco (153k but a secondary employment node). downtown baltimore and atlanta come in 23rd and 24 respectively. cleveland and columbus at 32nd and 34th, cincy and charlotte at 50th and 52nd. also interestingly is that it puts population within one mile at nearly 70k (69.5k). cleveland clocks in at 41k. sacramento and milwaukee at 73k and 75k respectively.

[Geeo]

That's an interesting way of looking at it. No two downtowns are alike, given geography and topography. Obvously, ours is hemmed in by rivers. Were it not for the rivers, I suspect that people on the north side and the lower hill would consider themselves denizens of downtown, since it's an easy walk.

[speagles84]

Most surprising to me was how high Oakland was rated "extremely dense" when downtown was only ranked "highly dense". Oakland shares that category with Midtown Manhattan, Downtown Manhattan, The Loop in Chicago, etc.