The country’s most distilled or concentrated population of top executives is found in the Washington D.C. metro area.

In Washington and its suburbs, the normalized ratio of executives to customer service representatives is 174, or 74 percent higher than the national level, a figure that has been more or less steady since the late 2000s (2005-2009).

The high ratio isn’t surprising given Washington’s status as the nation’s capital. As such, it is home to the federal government and is a magnet for corporations, trade groups and nonprofits that want to be close to the center of U.S. political and regulatory power.

Close behind is the New York metro area, a global city and the unrivaled business capital of the United States.

The city’s top executive count is more than twice as large as Washington’s, as captured by the thickness of its trend line. But its workforce is slightly less distilled than Washington’s, with a reading of 164.

The San Francisco Bay Area is the technology industry’s global headquarters and the epicenter of the U.S. housing crisis. Its concentration of wealth, combined with construction limits imposed by geography and restrictive land use policy, have put the city out of reach for most households.

As such, its workforce has become substantially more distilled in recent years as lower-income workers move out. Its executive-to-customer-service ratio rose from 140 in 2005-2009 to 167 in 2017-2021, overtaking New York.

Let’s focus briefly on population sizes.

In 2021 the New York metro area had more than 135,000 top executives, or 8.8 percent of the nation’s total.

The Los Angeles metro area had the nation’s second-largest executive population – 106,000 in 2021 – but its workforce is much less distilled than New York’s, though still more distilled than the national average of 100.

Combined, the two metros are home to 15.8 percent of the nation’s executive ranks.

The next size category, metro areas with at least 50,000 top executives in 2021, includes Washington, San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago.

Jointly, these four metros account for 15.2 percent of the nation’s top executives. Add New York and Los Angeles, and these six cities are home to 31 percent of U.S. executives.

The next size category, cities with 30,000 top executives, includes greater Dallas and Houston in Texas, Miami, Florida, Atlanta, Georgia, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

These five metros combined with the six noted above account for 43.8 percent of the nation’s chief executives.

It’s only in this group that we first encounter places–Atlanta and Dallas–where the workforce distillation is near the national average.

And while San Francisco’s steep upward trendline was the exception in a group of cities that showed relatively steady executive-to-customer-service ratios, some U.S. metros have seen big changes as their workforces became more or less distilled. Let’s take that lens next.

Two metro areas stand out for their sharply increasing workforce distillation: Austin, Texas, and Denver, Colorado.

Both also experienced a sharp rise in housing costs and an influx of people from more expensive parts of the country.

Austin’s pull is tied largely to its burgeoning tech industry. Denver is changing because of its relative proximity to California.

While the workforces in Austin and Denver are more distilled than the national average, that wasn’t the case a decade ago.

The Houston and Dallas regions also are top destinations for U.S. workers, owing to their economic strength and abundant housing. In Dallas, workforce distillation has risen steadily over time, though not nearly to the same extent as Austin’s.

Houston’s path has been less consistent.

Nashville, Tennessee, and Columbus, Ohio, also have experienced increased workforce distillation.

For these cities, the change has come more recently than it did to Austin and Denver.

While Nashville recently just breached the national average, Columbus has yet to reach that milestone.

In contrast to the high-ratio cities we’ve highlighted so far, some metros have experienced a falling ratio of top executives to customer service workers.

Miami is one example, though its workforce remains more distilled than the national average.

Tampa, Jacksonville, and Orlando all were less distilled than the nation as a whole in the late 2000s, and have become even less so since then.

It’s no coincidence that these metros are all located in the relatively affordable state of Florida, a destination for people from the coastal Northeast seeking warmth and a more affordable cost of living.

Other Southeastern metros with relatively low and declining ratios include Greenville, South Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina, and Memphis, Tennessee.

In the Southeast, Atlanta, Georgia, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Richmond and Virginia Beach in Virginia have seen their ratios hold roughly steady.

That was also the case for the four large metros of the Northeast – Washington, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia – which remained stable while maintaining their elevated levels of workforce distillation.

The Midwest’s urban centers have remained stable, too, with levels of distillation at or near the national average.

And continuing with the Midwest…

Notably, workforce distillation has increased in a number of metro areas in the Rust Belt, including Detroit, Michigan, Rochester, New York, and Cincinnati and Cleveland in Ohio.

This rising ratio of chief executives to customer service workers could be construed as welcome news, perhaps signaling renewed business dynamism in a region where housing is more affordable.

The story is different on the West Coast, where the dominant pattern is one of rising workforce distillation driven by declining housing affordability and a hollowing out of the middle class.

The San Francisco Bay Area is the extreme example, but greater San Diego isn’t far behind.

And while workforces in Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon, and Sacramento, California, have a lower ratio than their coastal California counterparts, it is rising as high-wage workers migrate from pricey coastal California, and low-wage workers are driven elsewhere.

Blue-collar greater Los Angeles is the exception.

While Seattle, Portland, and Sacramento welcome workers from the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix, Arizona, and Las Vegas, Nevada, owe most of their growth to people leaving Southern California and its high cost of living.

Phoenix and Las Vegas have some of the lowest executive-to-customer-service ratios of the nation’s large metros, in part because of their growing abundance of customer service roles.

And also in the Southwest are some metros found at the very low end of the workforce distillation. These include Albuquerque, New Mexico, and San Antonio and El Paso in Texas.

El Paso’s executive-to-customer-service ratio was 30 in 2017-2021, about one-sixth the size of Washington’s. That means for every customer service representative living in the Washington metro area, there are almost six times more chief executives than living in El Paso.