Downtown Wichita jobs decline

By the measure of jobs used by the City of Wichita, downtown jobs declined in 2015.

According to a series of data from the United States Census Bureau, the number of jobs in downtown Wichita declined by 1.6 percent from 2014 to 2015.

The data, known as LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics, or LODES, was updated in September to include data from 2015. ¹ Downtown Wichita is defined in this case as zip code 67202, which is the same definition used by the city of Wichita, Wichita Downtown Development Corporation, and Center for Economic Growth and Business Research at Wichita State University.

As can be seen in the nearby charts, the number of jobs has been on a mostly downhill trend.

There is, however a serious problem with this data series, as it includes workers whose “administrative home” is downtown, even though they work somewhere else. The Census Bureau makes this caveat clear to users of this data. ² Because all Wichita school district employees have an “address” of 201 N. Water in downtown Wichita, they appear in the LODES data series as employees with that address.

It is a serious mistake to count all Wichita school district employees as downtown workers. Most school employees work in schools and other sites scattered throughout the city, not in downtown. Further, this year the school district moved its administrative offices to the former Southeast High School building at Lincoln and Edgemoor. That’s in zip code 67218, not 67202. The effect of this on the LODES statistics (it will appear that some 7,000 workers have moved out of downtown Wichita) probably won’t appear for two or three years.

Even if we use the data series promoted by the Wichita Downtown Development Corporation, the trend in jobs is in the wrong direction. WDDC promotes the large investment in downtown Wichita, by both private and public sources. ³ But employment is trending in the opposite direction. ⁴

But this data series is not useful as a measure of the number of people working in downtown Wichita, as it overstates the true number. The LODES data is widely cited by the City of Wichita and affiliated agencies such as WDDC and the Wichita Chamber of Commerce. ⁵ It appears prominently in the State of Downtown report produced by WDDC, generally released on May of each year. So far, there is no report for this year.

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