Methods, definitions, and limits
How Texas Workforce Mobility Intelligence is governed.
The website separates residential geography from workplace geography, preserves explicit state legislative labels, and never stretches primary-job measures into claims the data cannot support.
Purpose
A governed engine for where workers live, where jobs exist, and how labor moves.
The backbone answers a fundamentally different question from a traditional demographic profile. ACS describes where people live. Census LODES describes where primary jobs are located and how primary-job relationships connect home and workplace geography.
Public language: use “daytime employment activity,” “workplace primary jobs,” “resident primary workers,” and “labor mobility.” Do not use “daytime population” for workplace_primary_jobs.
Backbone scope
Four major published geographies
The database path is E:\NDS_DUCKDB\databases\Mobility_Census_LODES_TX.duckdb.
Publishing layers
Canonical LODES and true-ZIP products remain distinct.
Canonical LODES layer
The canonical layer preserves the governed place representation built for statewide LODES intelligence.
True-ZIP commuter-pressure layer
The true-ZIP layer supports public postal-ZIP exploration and commuter-pressure publishing. The website lets users select the layer rather than silently mixing them.
District products
Texas House District Labor Mobility and Texas Senate District Labor Mobility are separately published state legislative products.
Core measures
Measure dictionary
| Field | Public meaning | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| workplace_primary_jobs | Primary jobs located in the geography | Daytime employment activity, not daytime population. |
| resident_primary_jobs | Primary workers associated with the home geography | Resident workforce base, not total employment population. |
| same_zcta_primary_jobs | Primary-job relationships with home and workplace in the same geography | Supports inbound, outbound, and local-capture calculations. |
| estimated_inbound_primary_workers | Workplace jobs apparently filled by workers living outside | Typically workplace jobs minus same-geography primary jobs. |
| estimated_outbound_primary_workers | Resident workers apparently working outside | Typically resident primary workers minus same-geography primary jobs. |
| net_commuter_inflow | Workplace primary jobs minus resident primary workers | Positive means destination-oriented; negative means workforce-exporting. |
| jobs_to_resident_worker_ratio | Workplace jobs divided by resident workers | High values indicate strong employment gravity; apply sensible thresholds. |
| inbound_share_of_workplace_jobs | Share of workplace jobs filled by workers from outside | Measures commuter dependence of the job center. |
| outbound_share_of_resident_jobs | Share of resident workers whose primary job is elsewhere | Measures outward workforce dependence. |
| resident_self_containment_rate | Share of residents who also work locally | Measures local retention of the resident workforce. |
| workplace_local_capture_rate | Share of local jobs filled by local residents | Measures how much of the workplace base is locally captured. |
Interpretation rules
Employment gravity is a place role—not a value judgment.
A high net inflow or ratio can describe downtowns, airports, medical districts, government centers, industrial corridors, campuses, or other destination geographies. A negative balance can describe a residential community whose workforce is employed elsewhere. Neither condition is automatically good or bad.
- Use both volume and ratios; ratios can be extreme when resident-worker counts are very small.
- Apply minimum workplace-job or resident-worker thresholds when ranking.
- Do not infer causation from association between labor mobility and consumer activity.
- Preserve primary-job language because the source uses JT01 Primary Jobs rather than every secondary job a person may hold.
Editorial role labels
Website classifications are transparent interpretations—not source fields.
The explorer adds descriptive role labels so readers can quickly understand a ZIP or district. These thresholds are part of the website presentation layer; they are not represented as Census categories, a certified composite score, or a judgment that one place role is better than another.
| Rule | Website label |
|---|---|
| Ratio ≥ 10 and positive net inflow | Exceptional Employment Destination |
| Ratio ≥ 2 and positive net inflow | Major Employment Magnet |
| Ratio ≥ 1.15 and positive net inflow | Employment Destination |
| Ratio ≤ 0.50 and negative net inflow | Residential Workforce Exporter |
| Ratio < 0.90 and negative net inflow | Workforce-Exporting ZIP |
| All other records with jobs and workers | Relatively Balanced Labor Geography |
Ranking safeguard: ratio and percentage rankings should be read with a minimum workplace-job or resident-worker threshold because very small denominators can produce extreme values.
Integrated consumer economy
The DuckDB contains a copied consumer-economy profile snapshot.
published.zip_consumer_economy_profile_v3 brings supported lottery activity, ACS purchasing power, Texas business activity, and LODES mobility into one database environment. This permits questions such as whether strong worker inflow helps explain consumer behavior that residential population alone cannot.
Supported context families
Winning claims, linked prize value, active winning retailers, population, households, income, poverty, employment, business scores, and mobility.
Interpretation boundary
These fields do not equal lottery ticket sales, actual retail spending, store foot traffic, or causal proof that commuters produced a consumer outcome.
Legislative labels
Use explicit Texas state legislative names.
Correct public labels are Texas House District Labor Mobility and Texas Senate District Labor Mobility. Avoid bare “House District” or “Senate District,” because “House” can be mistaken for the U.S. House of Representatives.
A future federal product should be called U.S. Congressional District Labor Mobility and remain separate.
Provenance and certification
Official source files matched the Census manifest.
All four official LODES source files positively matched the Census manifest using decompressed-content SHA-256 hashes. Canonical, true-ZIP, Texas House, Texas Senate, and raw-source layers populated successfully.
Remaining build note: a zero-row legacy auxiliary workplace-flow CSV remains the identified certification issue in that build. The populated public layers are not described as missing because of that auxiliary file.
What it cannot tell us alone
LODES is not foot traffic, spending, vehicles, tourism, or real-time presence.
- Actual store foot traffic
- Retail or credit-card spending
- Vehicle counts
- Tourism visitation
- Exact number of people physically present at any moment
- Lottery ticket sales
- Restaurant or bar spending
- Cellphone mobility
- Pedestrian counts
- Every secondary job a person may hold
Those questions require governed external sources such as TxDOT, TABC, tourism intelligence, transaction evidence, pedestrian counters, or mobility data.
Deployment workflow
DuckDB to deployable website data
- Keep the governed DuckDB at its authoritative E-drive path.
- Run
scripts\Export-TCR-Mobility-Data.ps1. - The script discovers candidate relations by required measures and expected row counts.
- It exports standardized ZIP, Texas House, and Texas Senate records.
- It replaces
data\nds-mobility-data.jsso the site runs locally or on a static host without database credentials. - Review the generated build report before publishing.
The website never connects a public browser directly to the DuckDB.