UC Irvine

Los Angeles (LA) County is a facet of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, a global city encompassing a significant portion of Southern California. Within this city lies a vibrant Transportation and Warehousing Sector that has served as a source of employment, as well as anchor to the global commodity chains that feed the city’s economic lifeblood. The global city itself is divided into numerous incorporations with varying jurisdictional boundaries and different economic regulations. Utilizing geographical information systems (GIS) to create graduated maps of T&W density, this study will highlight patterns in the distribution of the T&W sector in LA County. These jurisdiction boundaries and economic regulations have an influence on the density distribution of the T&W sector; with an agglomerative tendency among T&W subsector firms within specific incorporations, such as Lennox or Vernon. In addition, ethnicity appears to share a relationship with the density of the T&W sector; particularly, ethnicity of Hispanic or Latino origin, whom individuals make up a fair proportion of the minority labor employed in LA County. This study underlines the importance of firm location within a jurisdictional environment that attracts other-like subsector firms in the T&W sector, especially regarding infrastructure development and employment prospects of minority workers.