I am doing some analysis about additional employment based on uses of proposed buildings.
Does anyone know of a quick source to find detailed information on job estimates.
In particular, I'd like to find out about sq. ft. per construction worker.
Thanks
While not a direct answer to your question, I found the following interesting article:Originally posted by Planner Dude
http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/pdf/backintown.pdf
If you go to the end of the paper, it has some estimates of labor cost for different types of construction. By making some assumptions as to average wage, you could probably estimate the number of workers these costs imply...
If you do a thread search here you may find some examples - I think we have previously discussed this topic before. We use the following rates as a general guide:
Office - 1 job/25 sq. metres
Manufacturing/Industrial - 1 job/45 sq. metres
Retail - 1 job/110 sq. metres
I'm no expert but I think it would be a bit difficult to determine a rate per construction worker as it depend on the specifics of the individual project (e.g. high-rise v. low-rise, etc.).
Thanks to both of you. I've been searching on the net, cyburbia,etc and run across the things that you have discussed, but nothing that gets into dirty details like the number of restaurant workers (quality & high turnover), hotel workers (larger establishment) and of course construction workers.
Since the plan is based on transforming a corridor in a suburban edge city into a "World Class Boulevard," we have created a form based plan with with buildings and their percentage of floor space dedicated to specific uses.
My job was to aproximate the number of employees for each based on GSF of each use in each district.
I've been searching for some time, but haven't found anything on the amount of square feet per construction worker for the demolition of suburban offices and / or development of mixed use villages.
I found another figure from a post in this thread:We use the following rates as a general guide:
Office - 1 job/25 sq. metres
Manufacturing/Industrial - 1 job/45 sq. metres
Retail - 1 job/110 sq. metres
http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showthread.php?t=517
Converting Jerry's suggestions into sq. metres I get 76.2 (250*.3048) per office employee.
@Tranplanner, can you explain why his estimate would be three times larger than yours? He doesn't give any substantiation for his estimate, I was hoping you might.
Can anyone point to a general reference for these estimates?
1 sq meter = 10.76 sq ft, so 250 sq ft would be 23.2 sq meters, pretty close to the 25 cited earlier.
SF per construction worker is tough. If you can get a copy of the Planner's Estimating Guide by Arthur Nelson it has some decent estimates of SF by worker by industry.
The problem with construction workers is that they don't really use a lot of SF, but they might use a fair amount of land for outside storage, equipment parking, etc.
I recently completed work on a industrial land use study in Florida. In it, we simply took the amount of acres and SF of buildings used for construction activities (as listed by the property appraiser) and divided that by the number of people working in the construction industry in the County (as reported in the QCEW from the BLS). We felt that, unlike other industries, construction employment was pretty straightforward and could be (more or less) associated with it's related land use. Imperfect, but the best we could do without a dedicated survey. This method will count office workers and management who may not work on lands classified as being used for construction purposes, however.
Any insights on the number of jobs per square foot in a research office or wet/dry laboratory?
In the same study mentioned above, "Research/Development" uses were found to use 287 square feet of building space and 846 square feet of land per employee, based on 45 survey responses for "Research/Development" firm locations with 5 or more employees.
While the industry definitions used in the study are considered proprietary by the client, the "Research/Development" industry definition is based on NAICS and is pretty straightforward.
Is there a good way to calculate from a credible source/industry standard how many jobs can be created based upon square footage of projected projects?
Thanks,
Cameron W. DeBoy
Short answer: No.
I've never seen an impact model using only square footage of completed construction projects as an input. Generally, you would need to know what the spending on the project is going to be. Construction of a 50,000 square foot warehouse warehouse will have a much different cost, and therefore impact, than a 50,000 square foot office building, or a 50,000 square foot high-tech industrial space. Construction costs will also vary greatly across geographies complicating matters that much more.
If you don't know the cost of the project, you can likely come up with a very rough estimate if you do know that that Project A will be X square feet and you can determine that the average construction cost for that type of facility is $Y/sqft and then multiply X*Y for your total cost and then plug that into your model for spending to come up with a very rough jobs multiplier. To get something a bit more credible though, you will need to know what type of business (what is the NAICS code?) will be occupying the facility and how many people they will employ.
"Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost." - 1980 Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan
The California Redevelopment Agency has a "calculator" on its website. Caution though, it is California.
http://www.calredevelop.org/External...?ContentID=581
Brotip #2418 - know when it's time to switch from being "the little engine that could" to the "little engine that said, 'f*ck it'"
Call the University of South Carolina' business school or find a professor that focuses on development or a local economist. For a back of the envelope I use 1 job for every 400 sq ft created until I know more about the project. The danger in doing this is that if a building has a large foot print but has a low intensity then I have grossly overestimated the number of jobs being created.
As for construction jobs I don't track those since they are temporary. This number varies greatly based upon the building and its design.
"If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less" General Eric Shinseki
Call a large contractor in your area and ask to speak to one of their estimators.
They have info on the size of crew needed for masonry, carpentry, flooring, roofing, ceilings, etc. This would vary greatly on the type of job, and you might not find numbers for work they sub out like mechanical, plumbing and electrical.
Ask him if he could estimate the number of people he had on his last job, and see if that could be a typical job for your purposes. Of course the number of workers would change during construction phases, but you might be able to get him to estimate the total number of people he had, or the average number of people he had in an average month. If you multiply that times 12 that might give you a ball park figure for one construction firm for one year.
The estimator might be able to refer you to a construction organization that tracks total construction activity in your area, such as Dodge Reports. The Chamber of Commerce might be able to give you the number of new construction projects in your area, and you can use that as a multiplier for total number of construction jobs per year as a rough estimate.
You might consider treating the estimator to lunch to get him to really talking about some more general (but realistic) numbers and maybe other sources to help you find what you are looking for.
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