Offices, their number and their location, are emerging as a key, strategic element in the planning of major metropolitan areas. Urgent issues—such as the integration of the urban ghettos into a white-collar economy, the provision of viable public transit, the attraction of the middle class to the central city—are all related to office growth and location. Yet, the impact of offices on urban form has been so little understood in the United States that they are barely noticed in government statistics. Laboriously piecing together the data, this study fills in many of the missing facts, against the background of broad national trends, it focuses on the New York Region.
The Office Industry represents the eighth in a series of research reports for the Second Regional Plan, which was released in a “draft for discussion” in 1968. It is also a sequel to the 1967 Second Plan report, The Region’s Growth. That work dealt with economic and demographic projections for the New York urban region as a whole and did not go into the allocation of the projected growth within the Region; this subject was reserved for a proposed companion report on Regional Activities. Subsequently, the topic of office location was singled out for the more detailed treatment given in the present monograph.