Economy
The Problem With Defining 'Downtown'
And counting all of the people (and jobs) who have supposedly moved there.
Last year, the U.S. Census Bureau released a report on population trends in American downtowns, a helpful step toward quantifying the claims made by many cities that residents (and jobs) are moving there in droves (you can view the original report here... whenever the federal government reopens and the Census Bureau's shuttered website comes back online). The Census' blunt definition of "downtown," though, inevitably produced some grousing about over-and under-counts of local populations. It measured “downtown,” for lack of a better universal definition, as everything within a 2-mile radius of the local city hall.
In Baltimore (at left) and New York City (at right), here is what the resulting circles look like: