How do the cities within Cobb County rank in concentration of jobs?

As the Courier shifts its focus to provide heavier coverage of quality-of-life issues in the Cobb County, including mobility and the environment, we’re expanding, updating and repurposing some of the census-related articles we’ve published over the past few years.

The distribution of jobs in the county is obviously important in determining transportation and public transit policy, since mobility to and from jobs is a key for a healthy economy and quality of life.

We covered the county-wide job concentration in a previous article.

But how do Cobb’s cities (and Census designated places, or CDPs) rank in order of the number of jobs concentrated within their boundaries? Cobb has six cities (Acworth, Austell, Kennesaw, Marietta, Powder Springs and Smyrna) and three Census Designated Places (Fair Oaks, Mableton and Vinings).

This is another reworking and expansion of an earlier article we ran examining Cobb County by the Numbers, using data and tools from the U.S. Census Bureau.

After the Census Bureau began publishing results from the decennial census, and introduced a new set of easy-to-use tools for getting at the numbers, the Courier published a series of articles making use of the new tools.

Unfortunately those articles were introduced when the COVID pandemic dominated the news, so the census articles languished with low traffic, even though the information was important to an informed citizenry.

This article uses the OnTheMap tool from the U.S. Census Bureau to determine where 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.

So how do the cities within Cobb County rank?

Previously we took a look at where the jobs are concentrated countywide in Cobb County.

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

Today we’re going to look at how the cities and CDPs within Cobb County rank in terms of number of jobs. CDP stands for Census Designated Place. CDPs are areas that aren’t incorporated, but that the census bureau has decided have enough historic identity to keep figures on that area.

The three CDPs in Cobb County (in order of population) are Mableton, Vinings and Fair Oaks.

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

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 is the ranking of Cobb cities and CDPs in terms of number of jobs, followed by a screenshot of the heat map representing the numbers:

All Places (Cities, CDPs, etc.)	157,748
Marietta city, GA	72,277
Vinings CDP, GA	23,171
Smyrna city, GA	22,368
Kennesaw city, GA	14,820
Mableton CDP, GA	8,224
Acworth city, GA	6,878
Powder Springs city, GA	3,947
Fair Oaks CDP, GA	3,818
Austell city, GA (Partial)	2,242

As you can see, Marietta has more than twice the number of jobs as the next contender, Vinings, which is not surprising. In addition to large private employers like Lockheed Martin, Marietta has workplaces for both city and county government employees.

Vinings and Smyrna are in a near-tie. They are both in the I-75 corridor adjacent to the Cumberland area and the Battery, which as we saw previously, has the heaviest concentration of jobs in the entire county.

Fourth-place Kennesaw has employers in and around Kennesaw State University and the commercial areas around Town Center.