Commercial and Industrial Land Use Change, Job Decentralization and Growth Controls: A Spatially Explicit Analysis

This article studies the creation of commercial and industrial spaces and consequently jobs in suburban and exurban areas of Montgomery County, MD – part of the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. We utilize a spatially explicit framework of land use change analysis – which to date, has been applied solely in studies of residential decentralization and sprawl – to examine employment decentralization, a dominant trend in the United States. In view of the actual and potential impacts of this form of urban development, we argue for the need for balanced attention to both residential and job decentralization due to inconclusive evidence on whether people follow jobs or firms follow people towards suburbia and exurbia. We test the significance of market conditions, local government growth controls and other factors as drivers of industrial and commercial land use change through discrete choice statistical models.