Business diversity is essential for economic resilience. It creates broader opportunities, supports a wider range of workforce needs, and strengthens downtowns by relying on a diverse industry mix instead of any single sector.
CommercialCafe’s recent analysis uses the Shannon Equitability Index to assess this crucial aspect, ranking CBDs by the diversity of their industry sectors, business sizes, and office space classifications.
This index allows us to move beyond simple counts, measuring the balance of these elements to reveal if a CBD has a healthy ecosystem, that provides opportunities for everything from small businesses, to startups and corporations.
Here are some of the key highlights:
Charlotte ranked 5th overall among the country’s top 20 CBDs for business diversity with a total of 22 out of 30 points.
- Having looked at the distribution of businesses across CBDs, we found Charlotte had the 2nd-most balanced spread among companies with different levels of employment. Here, 62.8% of firms have fewer than 10 workers, while 9.5% of firms in the city’s CBD have a staff of 50 to 249 workers.
- The real estate market in Charlotte is heavily tilted toward state-of-the-art workspaces that tend to command higher asking rents, with 42% of overall office space within the CBD is labeled Class A+, another 53% are Class A, and only 5% Class B.
At a regional level, Southern cities played a major role in the ranking by contributing nearly half of the total number of entries, with other noteworthy mentions including Louisville, Ky. (9th place); Houston (10th place); and Jacksonville, Fla. (18th place).
You can find more information about this topic in our full study: https://www.commercialcafe.
