Data Analysis: Will Inland Empire and Ventura be added to Greater Los Angeles?
The data suggests it might.
Introduction
The Inland Empire is a region of Southern California based in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties that is adjacent to the Los Angeles Metro Area. The Inland Empire Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), consisting of the entirety of the two counties, is as of the 2022 estimates the 12th largest Metro area in the United States. Despite this, many outside California are entirely unaware of this region.
There are a variety of possible reasons for this, but one major reason is its proximity to Los Angeles, with many people considering it to be nothing more than far-flung suburbs and exurbs of LA. As of 2013, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which defines the MSAs, has the Inland Empire as its own MSA separate from Los Angeles. However, this MSA is considered part of the Los Angeles Combined Statistical Area (CSA), a larger statistical grouping that combines multiple adjacent MSAs with a large degree of overlap. The LA CSA consists of the LA MSA (Los Angeles and Orange Counties), the Inland Empire and Ventura County as its own MSA. To be in the same MSA, counties need to have 25% employment interchange, while for CSA this threshold is lower at 15%. This means that last time this was tabulated, the employment interchange between the Inland Empire and Los Angeles was greater than 15% but not greater than 25%. It has been a decade since then, and with rising prices in Los Angeles and increased development in the Inland Empire, we will determine if the data suggests that the Inland Empire, as well as Ventura County, should be part of the MSA proper.
Central Counties
The first step in determining what constitutes an MSA is defining the “central counties”. The OMB defines a central county of an MSA as follows:
For the purposes of this analysis, we want to specifically look at the urban areas of Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim and Riverside-San Bernardino, as depicted on the map at the beginning of the article. Presumably, LA County is a central county, so we specifically are looking to determine if Orange County and San Bernardino County qualify by having 50% of their population in the LA Urban Area. To determine this, I aggregated all the census blocks determined as part of an urban area, then grouped them by county, only including counties in the LA CSA, and Urban Area Census Code. This is the result of that tabulation:
As you can see from this table, both Orange County and Los Angeles County clearly meet the standard to be counted as central counties for the LA Urban Area, as both have an overwhelming majority of their population in it. San Bernardino meets the criteria to be a central county but since the largest urban area is Riverside-San Bernardino it would not be one for the LA Urban Area. Interestingly, Riverside County just slightly fails to meet the definition of a central county with Riverside-San Bernardino alone. However, it almost certainly would meet the definition when including other Urban Areas like the Temecula Valley and Coachella Valley. For our purposes, we will treat it as a central county of Riverside-San Bernardino.
Outlying Counties
Next, we have to determine the outlying counties for the MSA. The Census definition of this is as follows:
For the purpose of this analysis, this means that 25% of the workers residing in the Inland Empire counties must work in Los Angeles or Orange County, or that 25% of workers in those counties must come from Los Angeles or Orange County.
In order to determine this, we need to have data saying where people work and where they reside. There are two Census data products that tabulate this. The first is the American Community Survey Commuting Flows, which are the product used by the OMB to create the MSA delineations. This is based on the 5-Year estimates created from responses to the American Community Survey. However, the 2020 Commuting Flow has not been released to the public, so I can not use that for this analysis. Instead, I will be using a different source, the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) dataset. This is instead sourced from state unemployment insurance, meaning that it is an actual count of workers. However, it is missing certain groups such as Military, Postal and self-employed workers. So keep that in mind when following the Analysis. The full differences between these two are explained in this document.
This dataset consists of the Census block of the residence, the Census block of the workplace, and the number of workers making this “commute”. Since Census block codes contain information about the state and county the block is in, we can aggregate this by county. We can further aggregate by combining the central counties into groups, Orange and Los Angeles as LA Metro and San Bernardino and Riverside as the Inland Empire, and produce two tables. One that provides the percentage of workers in each county residing in a Metro Area, and one that provides the percentage of residents in each county working in a Metro area. I also included Ventura County separately in these tables even though it will make up a relatively small portion of the other two Metros due to its size.
First, let’s look at the percentage of workers working in each of the 5 counties, and which metro area they reside in.
This data shows that for the most part, the bulk of workers in any county consists of workers from the same Metro Area as the county. 84% of workers in Los Angeles County and 78% of workers in Orange County come from those two counties. The same goes for San Bernardino and Riverside, with 76% and 73% respectively coming from the Inland Empire. Even in Ventura County, this pattern holds, albeit to a lesser extent, with 65% of workers coming from Ventura County. While all of the three non-LA Metro counties have a significant portion of workers from the LA Metro, none cross the 25% threshold, and Riverside County in particular only barely crosses the 15% threshold for being in the CSA.
Now let’s look at the percentage of workers residing in the 5 counties that work in these Metro areas.
In this table, we see a similar pattern. Most workers residing in a county tend to work in the Metro Area their county is associated with. However, the percentage is significantly smaller for the counties outside of the LA Metro. Los Angeles and Orange County have over 85% of workers residing in them working in the LA Metro. For San Bernardino and Ventura County, around 35% of workers residing in them work in the LA Metro, and for Riverside County, it is over 25%. This means that all three counties meet the threshold on this metric to count as outlying counties for the Los Angeles MSA.
The combination of these two tables also shows the economic pull of the Los Angeles Metro Area, especially on San Bernardino and Ventura County. Let’s compare the results of the two tables. In the first table, LA Metro residents made up 15–20% of workers in the other three counties, showing LA Metro workers do constitute a significant workforce for them. However, those counties accounted for relatively little of the workforce in the LA Metro, with the highest being 12% of Orange County, the smaller of the two central counties, coming from the Inland Empire counties. Despite being a small percentage of the workers in the LA Metro, looking at the second table, we can see they make up a large number of residents of their county, with around 35% of workers from Ventura and San Bernardino working in Los Angeles or Orange County. This means a lot more people are commuting to the LA Metro from these counties than LA Metro residents are commuting out to them.
Conclusion
The OMB states that they will release the Decennial Delineation for MSAs the month this is published (June 2023), although it has not happened yet. My analysis here suggests that it is likely the LA MSA will be updated to include San Bernardino and Ventura County as outlying counties. As stated before, the OMB uses slightly different data than what I used here, so with the addition of postal workers, military and self-employed workers the percentages could be quite different. Despite this, San Bernardino and Ventura County are so much higher than the threshold that I think it is still likely they will meet the criteria even with these additional workers.
Riverside County in my analysis does meet the threshold to be included, however, it is borderline as only 26% of workers residing there work in the central counties. It is entirely possible that with additional workers in the estimate, it will fall under the threshold and remain a separate MSA in the same CSA. This also makes sense as Riverside County has a significant amount of urban areas disconnected from Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim and Riverside-San Bernardino, having none of the former, and is also the only county in the MSA that does not border Los Angeles itself.
So ultimately, expect the new Los Angeles MSA to be Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura and San Bernardino County. Riverside County may also be in it, or it may be the sole central county of the Riverside MSA that is part of the Los Angeles CSA.
Data Sources
LODES Data here: https://lehd.ces.census.gov/data/
Census Urban Area data here: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural.html
Urban Area Wall Map here: https://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/DC2020/UA20/UA_2020_WallMap.pdf
You can see all the SQL Queries I used to make the tables in this Repo: https://github.com/HemusK/Data-Analysis-Projects/tree/main/California%20Census%20Project
