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Figure 3.2 Irvine jobs by industry, location quotients 1980-2016
from Irvine at 50: From a Planned Community to a Growing Job Center
by University of California, Irvine - School of Social Ecology
MFI Report: Irvine at 50: From a Planned Community to a Growing Job Center December 2021
Figure 3.2
Figure 3.2 shows the location quotient of jobs in each industry for Irvine compared to the region (Southern California, as a whole). 12 Not only have jobs in professional industries been growing in Irvine, but they’ve been growing faster than the rest of the region. Thus, Irvine had about 30% more professional jobs than the region in 1980 (given a location quotient of 1.3), and has remained at 50% more professional jobs than the region since 1990. Despite the growth in jobs in education and health industries, Irvine has only 60-75% as many of these jobs as the region. We see that Irvine is actually a hub of manufacturing jobs, as they have 40-85% more manufacturing jobs than the region. On the other hand, Irvine has only 50-85% as many retail jobs as the region, 50-60% as many entertainment and food jobs, and about 50% as many service jobs since 2000. Whereas Irvine had a very high concentration of construction jobs in 1980 with the early growth of the city, that has steadily declined since then and there are now about 70% as many construction jobs in Irvine compared to the region. Finally, we see that Irvine has a similar percentage of agriculture jobs in 2000 and 2010 compared to the region, although that has fallen sharply in the 2010s.
12 We caution that the number of categories of industries is smaller in 1980 compared to the later years. Although this should not affect our location quotient values for the categories that are available, it does explain why we are missing the education/health and entertainment/food categories in 1980.
