In honor of Black History Month, we recently took a dive into Black-owned businesses in Metro Atlanta by sector. In today’s follow-up post, we have compiled data from the Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey and Lightcast for the 15 largest metro areas in the country for a similar analysis. This time, however, we have included another variable: the percent employment of each metro area that is Black (shown along the y-axis below). When compared to the largest metro areas nationally, Atlanta features the largest Black share of the workforce at over 33%. The next largest percentage of Black employment among the nation’s largest metro areas is Washington, D.C. at just under 25%.
As with the chart in the first post, the following images provide three different “views” on Black business ownership locally and among the 15 largest US metro areas: (1) Black-owned firms as a percent of all firms, (2) employees of Black-owned firms as a percent of employees of all firms, and (3) annual payroll of Black-owned firms as a percent of annual payroll of all firms. You can toggle through these “views” by using the gray dropdown menu below the chart. Note: the y-axis will remain changed for all three of these views, with only the x-axis changing dynamically based on the dropdown selection.
For the first view of Black-owned firms, the above chart shows roughly 3 groupings of cities with respect to the x- and y-axes, with Atlanta and Washington, D.C. far above the pack in terms of employed workforce percentage that is black (y-axis) and Black-owned firms as a percentage of all firms (x-axis). The chart suggests a roughly linear relationship between these variables, with Atlanta alone in the top-right and a gaggle of coastal cities in the bottom-left. Fellow Sunbelt metros Miami, Houston, and Dallas feature Black employment percentages that are 15-20 percentage points below that of metro Atlanta, with percentages of Black-owned firms well below that of metro Atlanta as well. Cleary it is not without merit that Atlanta is crowned the nation’s hub for Black-owned businesses!
When the x-axis is changed to “Employees,” the chart now represents employees of Black-owned firms as a percent of employees of all firms in the region. Again, these data suggest linear relationship, although somewhat less distinct. Once more, metro Atlanta and D.C. lead the way, but this time our nation’s capital tops the list (ahead of our own metro area) along the x-axis. Despite this, the workforce specifically of Black-owned firms comprises a larger share of the overall workforce in Atlanta compared with most other national metros, speaking to overall economic vitality of these Black-owned businesses.
The final dropdown view of the chart shows “Annual Payroll” along the x-axis. This shows annual payroll of Black-owned firms as a percentage of annual payroll for all firms in the metro area. Once again, the y-axis remains unchanged, showing the percent of employed workforce that is Black. Here, the data suggest an even weaker linear relationship, but the Atlanta metro features the second-highest percentage behind D.C. But with this metric, the gap of Atlanta-based Black-owned businesses is much narrower with the next tier of Miami, Los Angeles, and Detroit.
Even with this narrower gap, the trend suggests that Atlanta Black-owned businesses are “above the pack” relative to peer cities in terms of payroll, again indicating their overall economic health and contribution to the local business sector. Atlanta continues to be a hub of Black entrepreneurship and economic activity when compared to other large metro areas.