A few days ago, The Office of Management and Budget announced that Brunswick county is back in the Wilmington metropolitan area after being in the Myrtle Beach-Conway-North Myrtle Beach, MSA since 2010. This is an important development as the three county area now consists of more than 450,000 people which is a 50% increase due the inclusion of Brunswick county.
This has significant implications for how the area’s labor market, purchasing power, and attractiveness from an economic development and investment standpoint is perceived. Below, we provide some context around how connected Brunswick county and New Hanover county are to each other.
Commuting patterns are important to understand as they determine the size of the labor market, determine the connection across communities, and hold information about worker flows and consumption. They are crucial to planning for improvements to road and highway infrastructure, developing transportation plans and services, and understanding where people are traveling in the course of a normal day.
In this brief, we use data from the longitudinal employment household dynamics to describe these patterns. As of 2020, of the 85,416 workers who are employed in New Hanover county, 44,975 -52.7%- individuals live in the county, 11% live in Brunswick county, and another 8.2% live in Pender. The rest of the workers are spread out through the state. This shows that almost half of all the earnings by workers employed in New Hanover county flow to other counties. While one can consider these earnings to be leakage, it also points to the fact that the labor market consists of more than just the people who reside whithin the boundaries of the county.
Figure 1: New Hanover job counts by where workers live
In figure 2, we show the work location of New Hanover county residents. Instead of focusing on the jobs, this analysis focuses on the residence of these individuals. We find that 65% of residents work in their county of residence, 5.2% work in Brunswick county, 4.7% work in Wake county, 3.1% in Mecklenburg, and the rest in other locations.
Figure 2: New Hanover Jobs Counts by Counties Where Workers are Employed - Private Primary Jobs
What does this all mean?
As the area continues to grow, these connections across communities will be become even more important to decompose and understand. Brunswick county, not long ago, was thought of as bedroom community. These days, it is its own vibrant county with considerable linkages to its neighbors, and now with its reincorporation into the Wilmington metropolitan area, the statistics will be more reflective of the strong connection across the three counties.