People are constantly telling us where California would rank if it were its own country. Sometimes Los Angeles gets the same treatment. We at The Basin love this game! A local-feeling place you’re familiar with sits next to an entire country and you point and go “wow” while grasping its true scale put into context against some hand-picked examples.
We wanted to try something smaller, with a part of Los Angeles that usually comes up for other reasons in the media: Downtown.
Crime, homelessness and the condition of Downtown’s streets tend to dominate the conversation about the neighborhood containing Los Angeles’s historic center, with many seeing the whole district as a blight on the city. But the payroll employment attached to this often-underappreciated neighborhood makes Downtown one of the city’s most important economic centers. The Census Bureau’s 2023 employment estimates assign 317,316 jobs to Downtown, about 16% of the City of Los Angeles’s total. Century City, the next-largest neighborhood job center, has 91,055.
That is a considerable gap in a city with so many places to work. Westwood has 87,581 jobs, Westchester has 76,315 and Hollywood has 60,290. Downtown has held first place in every year of the series we examined, from 2019 through 2023.
317,316 jobs in 5.82 square miles
Payroll jobs assigned to LA’s five largest neighborhood job centers, 2023
A neighborhood with a city’s worth of jobs
Downtown covers 5.82 square miles, about 1.2% of Los Angeles’s land. It had 66,555 residents in the 2020 census, or 1.7% of the city’s population. Those population and employment figures give some sense of how much work is attached to a relatively small part of LA.
There are whole-city comparisons, too. Long Beach has 175,424 payroll jobs in the same 2023 records. Pasadena has 112,398, Glendale 109,520 and Santa Monica 90,249. Downtown’s reported total is larger than each of them, even though it is a neighborhood within a much larger city.
Those comparisons all stay inside Los Angeles County. Downtown’s total also stands up against cities that run their own governments. New Orleans records 192,799 payroll jobs in the same 2023 series and Oakland 220,612, both below Downtown. Detroit records 228,761, on Michigan data that stops in 2021. If Downtown were inserted into a ranking of incorporated places by jobs recorded within their boundaries, it would place 36th, between Miami and El Paso.
New Orleans vs. Downtown Los Angeles
The City of New Orleans drawn to scale next to Downtown Los Angeles
Crucially, jobs are the measure here. These files don’t tell us Downtown’s economic output in dollars, and they don’t measure everyone who works. Self-employment and informal work fall outside these records. A job assigned to a Downtown workplace also tells us nothing about how often someone comes into the office.
The addresses in the records
There is a more immediate problem with taking that 317,316 literally. Employers can have jobs spread across several locations that end up recorded at one administrative address. The jobs exist; their placement on the map can be misleading.
Downtown’s largest census block illustrates the problem. The records assign 74,635 jobs to a 21-acre block in the Civic Center, nearly a quarter of Downtown’s total. That should not be read as 74,635 people working on that block. Public administration accounts for 94,110 jobs across Downtown, making the neighborhood particularly sensitive to how government payrolls are located.
The Basin’s analysis tests how much that concentration affects the ranking. Removing the largest job block from every neighborhood leaves Downtown with 242,681 jobs. Westchester moves into second place with 56,183.
A separate calculation excludes the entire public administration sector from every neighborhood. Downtown falls to 223,206 jobs, while Century City has 91,048. The gap narrows, but Downtown still has about two and a half times as many jobs.
Three different methods
Three tests of the ranking, applied equally to all 114 neighborhoods
That is enough to be reasonably confident about Downtown’s place in the ranking, while being more cautious about the exact number of jobs. It finishes first under all six versions tested, including the versions that remove several large blocks. None of those calculations tells us where every job actually belongs.
Those sensitivity tests also change some of the broader comparisons. Downtown’s 317,316 jobs outnumber Wyoming’s 274,408 and Vermont’s 303,206, which is a striking result for 5.82 square miles. Remove its largest block and Downtown drops to 242,681, below both states. The city comparisons hold up under that test, while the state comparison does not.
Downtown records more payroll jobs than two states
Payroll jobs in the same series, with Downtown shown before and after its largest block is removed
The recovery since 2021
“Hollowing out” needs a time frame. Downtown lost jobs between 2019 and 2021, falling from 332,274 to 288,297 in these records. By 2023 it had regained 29,019 jobs, an increase of 10.1% from that low.
It was still 14,958 jobs short of its 2019 count, a decline of 4.5%.
Downtown has recovered since 2021 but remains below 2019
Downtown payroll jobs, 2019 to 2023
Nor can a job count settle what is happening to Downtown’s street life. Someone’s job can remain attached to an office without that person being there five days a week. These records don’t track office attendance, occupied storefronts or commercial spending.
Beyond Downtown
The residence records help explain why this matters outside the neighborhood. Looking only at primary jobs, a measure that assigns each worker to one job, 31.7% of the people working in Downtown live in the City of Los Angeles. Another 45.4% lives elsewhere in LA County, and 22.9% lives beyond the county.
Most of the people tied to these jobs, then, live outside the city that governs Downtown’s streets. That gives its condition a reach well beyond the people who live there. A discussion about what Downtown needs should account for the hundreds of thousands of jobs still attached to it, even as the neighborhood works through the losses these employment figures describe.
Methods
Employment figures use the Census Bureau’s LEHD LODES8 series, version 8.4, data year 2023; the historical series covers 2019–2023. These are not raw payroll files. The Census Bureau builds LODES mainly from state unemployment insurance wage records and federal administrative data, assigns each job to a workplace and to a residence, and then adds statistical noise and synthetic records to protect the confidentiality of individual employers and workers, which makes a block-level count an estimate rather than a headcount (LODES technical documentation). Job totals count all jobs (JT00), including second jobs. Residence shares use primary jobs (JT01). Population is from the 2020 census. Geography follows the LA Times Mapping LA neighborhood boundaries, clipped to the city. State and city comparisons come from the same 2023 all-jobs series, with cities measured on Census place boundaries and states on their full totals; Michigan’s series ends in 2021, which is the year shown for Detroit. The national rank counts incorporated places only, adds Downtown as an extra entry and leaves Los Angeles in the list. Coverage is incomplete because jobs outside state unemployment insurance, including most self-employment, never enter the series; workplace assignment can be imprecise; and the records do not measure hybrid schedules.