Where are the jobs in Cobb County concentrated?

On Sunday we took a look at what the commuter flows are like in Cobb County: how many people live in Cobb but commute outside the county for their job, how many people live in other counties but work in Cobb, and how many both live and work in the county.

We used the OnTheMap tool from the U.S. Census Bureau to determine those numbers.

Today we’re going to look at where the jobs within Cobb County are concentrated.

The U.S. Census Bureau gathers those figures in their American Community Survey and provides tools that allow people to map, visualize and create tables and charts from that data.

And they are surprisingly easy to use. Just follow this link to the OnTheMap tool, or scroll to the videos at the bottom of the article that instruct you on how to learn things about employment in any area of the U.S.

I’m going to repeat a couple of caveats I gave in the article about what the commute flows look like in Cobb County. One is that gathering the data is time-consuming for the Census Bureau, so there is a time lag before sets of data become available. This article was written based on the 2019 ACS.

The second is that the COVID pandemic affected both the gathering of the data, and the job market itself, although some economists don’t believe the market has been affected as severely as earlier news reports would indicate.

With those out of the way, let’s get right to the point.

Here’s a paste-up of a screenshot of the map showing the concentration of jobs in Cobb County, and a map legend to show you how to interpret the color-coding (you can make it bigger by clicking on it):

As you can see, the Cumberland area along I-75 near the eastern border of the county is the largest single concentration of jobs.

But the job centers continue all the way up I-75 past Marietta and into the Kennesaw area. The job concentrations at the top end include Kennesaw State University, Town Center, and the intense cluster of commercial properties between Barrett Parkway on the south and McCollum Parkway on the north.

So at least in terms of jobs, I-75 is the economic engine of Cobb County.

The other significant job centers are the zone between South Cobb Drive and Atlanta Road around Plant Atkinson Road (near Georgia Power’s Plant McDonough-Atkinson), the industrial area at the southern tip of the county, the commercial area around the intersection of Austell Road and the East West Connector, and pockets of activity along Shallowford and Johnson Ferry roads in East Cobb.