Brookings study: only 10 US cities have grown their share of tech jobs since 2010, resulting in less diversity for companies and no economic windfall elsewhere
Where tech jobs go, so does wealth. — US jobs in tech, arguably the dominant industry of our time, are increasingly concentrating …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years after covering how tech companies were reshaping US cities through investments and promised jobs, Brookings quantified the flip side: only 10 metros grew their share of tech jobs after 2010, and the rest got neither the employment nor any offsetting windfall. The study also ties the map to who builds the industry — concentrated geographies yield less diverse company rosters.
The finding became a baseline others now measure against: Brookings' own follow-up found 36 cities, Philadelphia included, posting stronger tech growth than before the pandemic, and BLS data show California's slice of US tech jobs shrinking every year since 2020 — evidence the 2010s concentration was a peak, not a permanent state.
First-order effects
- The ten winning metros keep capturing essentially all net new tech employment while everyone else competes for scraps, and Brookings links that winner-take-all geography directly to less diverse workforces inside the companies clustered there.
- Non-winning cities learn the civic bargain is worse than advertised: as city officials noted around Amazon's New York and Virginia expansion, only about half the promised jobs were actually tech roles, so headline headcounts overstate what a landing really delivers.
Second-order effects
- Second-tier metros respond by bidding harder on incentives to buy what organic clustering never gave them, even though the fine print on deals like Amazon's shows administrative roles pad the numbers.
- The concentration itself starts loosening under remote work and layoffs — San Francisco offices sat at just 43.1% occupancy by late 2022 while Austin hit 62.7% — giving smaller metros their first real shot at tech payrolls in over a decade.
Third-order effects
- If the post-pandemic diffusion holds, the industry's diversity problem gets re-geography rather than solved: jobs spread across more metros, but each new cluster risks reproducing the homogeneous hiring Brookings flagged in the original ten.
- Because Brookings found no compensating windfall outside the winners, the structural stakes stay political — 'where tech jobs go, wealth goes' remains the organizing question for urban policy, now applied to a dispersing rather than concentrating map.
The trend: US tech employment is slowly diffusing from a handful of coastal hubs toward dozens of secondary metros, unevenly unwinding the concentration Brookings documented for the 2010s.