New Geography

Author: Joel Kotkin and Michael Shires

  • The Cities Creating The Most High-Wage Jobs

    As the country moves toward full employment, at least as economists define it, the quality of jobs has replaced joblessness as the primary concern. With wages still stagnant, rising an anemic 2.5% in the year to May, the biggest challenge for most parts of the U.S. is not getting more people into the workforce but rather driving the creation of the types of jobs that can sustain a middle-class quality of life.

    To that end, the key sector to watch is business and professional services. By far the nation’s largest high-wage sector — including such fields as law, accounting, architecture, advertising, engineering, scientific research and development, and computer systems design – it employs 20.5 million Americans, roughly the same as the finance and manufacturing industries combined. Over the past decade, the number of people working in business and professional services has expanded by nearly 2.5 million, including an increase of more than half a million jobs in the last year.

    We decided to take a look at which metropolitan areas are gaining the most professional and business services jobs and the trends that are driving some to pull ahead while others fade. Our rankings look at employment in the sector over time— assessing short, medium and long-term job trends and adding in variables for persistence and momentum as well. The results of these trends, based on three-month averages, are normalized and each metropolitan statistical area is assigned a score based on its relative position in each area. The rankings this year produced some surprising results, as well as some familiar stories.

    The shift to affordable places

    Looking at the 70 largest labor markets in the country, the clear winners are affordable, business-friendly locales – and their momentum is growing. These span an array of regions, from the Midwest heartland to the Deep South, Texas and the Intermountain West.

    Our number one metro area for professional and business service jobs, Nashville, Tenn., epitomizes many of the characteristics that drive high-end employment today. Since 2011, Nashville’s job count in professional and business services has expanded a remarkable 42.6% to 160,300, easily the highest growth rate of any major metropolitan area. Management and technical consulting, architecture and related services have led this growth.

    The very forces that lead companies to Nashville — low taxes and a pro-business regulatory environment — also apply to several of our other top 10 places. These include No. 2 Kansas City, Mo., which has logged 28.4% growth since 2011. KC, better known in the rest of the country for barbecue and its music scene (though not quite Nashville), has grown a vibrant economy based in good part on service businesses in architecture and innovative administrative support models (especially for health care providers), accounting for some 100,000 jobs in professional and business services.

    But for the most part of the fastest-growing areas for business services are also the same areas that did best on our overall list. These include the Texas powerhouses of Austin-Round Rock (third), Dallas-Plano-Irving (fifth), and San Antonio-Braunfels (sixth), all of which logged 25% job growth or more since 2011. Salt Lake City, ranked ninth, has become a major magnet for business service, outpacing such hot spots as 21st-ranked Seattle and No. 28 Denver. Charlotte, another consistent performer, ranked eighth.

    The last big region for fast-growing high-wage service jobs is Florida, led by 10th-ranked Orlando, 11th-place Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater and No. 14 Ft. Lauderdale-Pompano Beach-Deerfield Beach. Better known for its huge hospitality industry, Florida cities like Orlando have become major lures to large companies seeking lower costs and taxes. Orlando is home to corporate or regional headquarters of Darden Restaurants, Tupperware, AAA, Deloitte, and the fast-growing auto service firm, Greenway Automotive. Over the last two years, the business services sector grew more than tourism, adding almost 24,000 jobs compared to 21,300 for tourism.

    Places Where Value Still Outpaces Costs

    Yet not all of the economies creating the most high-wage jobs are in the lower-cost states. There remains a handful of places with high taxes and strict regulation that are attractive to businesspeople. Perhaps the best example is San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, which is down two notches from last year to fourth place, but remains on a tear, with over 34% growth since 2011. This growth is driven in large part by the tech industry, which is increasingly integrated into business services.

    One prime example is Salesforce.com, a firm with strong tech assets, but whose customer relationship management tools are firmly in the business service space. The company has quadrupled its sales to $8 billion since 2012 and now employs 6,600 people at its San Francisco headquarters, making it the second largest private employer in the city after the venerable Wells Fargo.

    Seventh-ranked San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, the capital of Silicon Valley, has also been able to dodge the cost bullet, enjoying 34% business services job growth since 2011. Other high cost areas that have seen impressive growth in business services include No. 20 New York, with 21.2% growth since 2011 to 735,300 jobS

    the most of any metro area in the nation, as well as No. 24 Boston, with 17.1% growth over the same period. As competitive pressure in these tech-heavy metro areas has surged, it has driven up the local demand for professional services.

    Many other high-cost metro areas have not done so well. In Southern California, 32nd-ranked Anaheim-Santa Ana-Irvine, with a job growth rate of 19.3%, is the pick of the litter. Other parts of this heavily populated area do worse, including San Diego 49th ) and Los Angeles (53rd), where growth was 11.6%, way below the average of 16.5% for large MSAs. Riverside-San Bernardino, which did respectably in our overall job growth survey, ranked a poor 67th in business services, with a 6.9% drop last year.

    What the future may bring

    The future of business services presents a mixed picture. Areas with particularly strong technical expertise, such as the Bay Area and Boston, and financial talent, notably New York, continue to do well. Yet job growth is slowing in all three; San Jose and San Francisco posted the lowest growth among the top 10 metro areas in 2016, well below such places as Nashville, San Antonio and Kansas City.

    Does this suggest a developing trend? Certainly the ease of online communication may grease the skids for firms to locate people in less expensive regions. Although salaries for business professionals are higher in places like San Francisco or New York, the cost of living, particularly housing, cuts into the value of their salaries. Estimated median home prices in the City by the Bay hit $1.5 million in May, more than six times the national median price of $244,800.

    Further down the road, we may also see the shift of some business to small and mid-sized cities, which constituted 10 of the top 12 fastest growing areas for business service jobs, led by such diverse places as Wausau, Wisc., Monroe, Mich., and College Station, Texas. As companies look to cut costs and still offer a middle-class standard of living to their employees, such shifts could be in hand. If so, the much dismissed prospects for small cities may prove far brighter than many may expect.

    This piece originally appeared on Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Dr. Michael Shires primary areas of teaching and research include state, regional and local policy; technology and democracy; higher education policy; strategic, political and organizational issues in public policy; and quantitative analysis. He often serves as a consultant to local and state government on issues related to finance, education policy and governance. Dr. Shires has been quoted as an expert in various publications including USA Today, Newsweek, The Economist, The Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle, and LA Times. He has also appeared as a guest commentator on CNN, KTLA and KCAL to name a few.

    Photo by Peter Miller, via Flickr, using CC License.

  • Where Manufacturing Is Thriving In The U.S.

    Throughout the dismal presidential campaign, the plight of America’s manufacturing sector played a central role. Yet despite all the concerns raised about factory jobs leaving the country, all but 18 of the country’s 70 largest metropolitan regions have seen an uptick in industrial employment since 2011. And despite the slowdown in car sales, the job count continues to expand, albeit more slowly. 

    Although the share of industrial jobs has shrunken from 10.5% of all nonfarm employment in 2005 to 8.5% today, manufacturing continues to have an outsized influence on regional economies, as is spelled out in the latest paper from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. This stems in large part from the industrial sector’s productivity gains since 2001 –– almost twice as much as the economy-wide average,  according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — and it has a far higher multiplier effect (the boost it provides to local job and wealth creation) than virtually any other sector. Manufacturing generates $1.40 in economic activity for every dollar put in, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, far greater than the multiplier generated by business services, information, retail trade or finance. 

    To determine the places where manufacturing growth is the strongest, we looked at employment in the sector over time, assessing short-, medium- and long-term trends going back to 2005 and adding in variables for persistence and momentum as well. The results of these trends, based on three-month averages, are normalized and each MSA is assigned a score based on its relative position in each area. (For a more detailed description of the methodology, click here.) The rankings this year produced some surprising results, as well as some familiar stories. 

    Gallery: The U.S. Cities Where Manufacturing is Thriving

    Red States And The Rust Belt Win

    Nine of this year’s top 10 regions for manufacturing job growth are in red states, led by top-ranked Louisville-Jefferson County, which straddles the border between Kentucky and Indiana. Since 2011, manufacturing employment in the metropolitan area has expanded 30.2% to a total of 83,300 jobs, led by a resurgent auto industry that accounts for 27,000 jobs in the area. Due to a slowdown in auto sales, the job count may be peaking, but the hub of the Bluegrass State has had a pretty good ride. 

    Louisville is no outlier in the old Rust Belt. Second-ranked Grand Rapids-Wyoming, Mich., has logged a 22% gain in industrial jobs over the same span, spread across a range of sectors including aerospace, advanced metals, automotive, office furniture and medical device manufacturing. In the longtime furniture-making center, 20% of jobs are in manufacturing, the highest proportion among the nation’s largest metro areas.  

    Our ranking features several other Midwestern cities on the industrial upswing: No. 4 Kansas City, Mo., No. 5 Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, Mich., and No. 10 Detroit-Dearborn-Livonia. Taken together the latter two Michigan metro areas are now home to over 245,000 manufacturing jobs, up dramatically from the 205,500 manufacturing jobs they accounted for in 2011 and just below the 252,300 jobs they tallied a decade ago, before the Great Recession hit. 

    Among the other red state winners are Florida with third place West Palm Beach-Boca Raton-Delray Beach, where the industrial job count has grown 27.67% since 2011, in part from older industries such as food as well as technology, and No. 8 Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, where manufacturing growth is tied to the burgeoning aerospace sector. And then there’s the Beehive State’s economically buzzing capital of Salt Lake City in ninth place, where manufacturing job growth is spread along many industries, including aerospace, construction materials, metals and oil and gas-related manufacturing. 

    Blue State Surprises 

    Only one region outside the red states made it to the top 10: seventh-place Albany-Schenectady, N.Y. In a state and region that has been losing industrial jobs since the late 1960s, Albany has bucked the trend with a 17.6% gain in manufacturing jobs from 2011 to 2016 to to 25,800 positions. The area boasts factories that produce steam and gas turbines, computer chips and medical supplies — an impressive and diverse collection of cutting–edge industries. Meanwhile the industrial workforce in once-mighty New York City continues to whither. In 1950 the city had nearly a million manufacturing workers; now there are 74,100 after 4.7% shrinkage in 2016. New York ranks second to last in our survey among the 70 largest metro areas in the U.S. 

    Gallery: The 15 U.S. Cities Leading An Industrial Renaissance

     Even in heavily regulated California, which has been continuously shedding industrial jobs since 1988 (about 800,000 manufacturing jobs lost to date), some areas are showing surprising new strength. Take Oakland-Hayward-Berkeley, which has seen a 12.7% jump in industrial jobs to 89,600 since 2011, ranking it 13th on our list. The big player here appears to be Tesla, whose Fremont factory employs 6,500. The Fremont area has become something of a hotspot, with more than 900 manufacturing companies including AlterG and LAM Research. 

    Some believe it’s a byproduct of the Valley’s attempt to lay claim to “the Internet of things,” but other parts of the Bay Area are showing some signs of an industrial renaissance, including No. 18 San Francisco-Redwood City-South San Francisco and 22nd-ranked San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara. One big problem in some of these areas is attracting enough skilled workers given ultra-high housing prices. 

    Industrial Players In Decline 

    Many of the largest industrial areas are not doing so well. Houston, the nation’s third-largest manufacturing center, has seen industrial employment drop since 2011 by 5.49% to 220,900 jobs amid the skid in energy prices. Other oil patch economies have lost industrial jobs, including No. 57 Oklahoma City and No. 64 New Orleans-Metairie, La. Hopefully improved conditions for energy companies, particularly under President Trump, may improve prospects there as well. 

     It’s somewhat harder to find much hope for the nation’s two largest industrial regions. The Chicago-Arlington-Naperville region ranks 56th, having lost 1.85% of its industrial jobs since 2011, continuing decades of decline. Manufacturing in the City of Broad Shoulders has slumped from just under a million jobs in 1966 to 520,000 in 1990, 465,000 in 2000 and 281,000 today.  

    Even worse is the performance of Los Angeles-Glendale-Long Beach, which still has the most industrial jobs in the nation, some 356,000. Since 2011, the region has lost 3.47% of its industrial jobs, and 2.10% last year alone. On paper the L.A. region should be benefiting from hosting the headquarters of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and buzzy startups like Hyperloop and AIO Robotics. But whatever is being gained by way of these companies has been more than canceled out by downsizing, outsourcing and automation across the sector, as well as continuing losses in the aerospace and apparel industries. 

    Ultimately the future of high-cost metro areas like L.A. and the Bay Area may rest to a surprising extent on their ability to link up with cutting–edge tech industries. Elsewhere lower–cost regions should experience some continued growth as the current presidential administration seeks to encourage more on-shoring of basic production.

    This piece originally appeared on Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Dr. Michael Shires primary areas of teaching and research include state, regional and local policy; technology and democracy; higher education policy; strategic, political and organizational issues in public policy; and quantitative analysis. He often serves as a consultant to local and state government on issues related to finance, education policy and governance. Dr. Shires has been quoted as an expert in various publications including USA Today, Newsweek, The Economist, The Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle, and LA Times. He has also appeared as a guest commentator on CNN, KTLA and KCAL to name a few.

    Photo by Industrial Traffic.com, via Flickr, using CC License.

  • The Best Small and Medium-Size Cities For Jobs 2017

    Much of the U.S. media tends to see smaller cities as backwaters, inevitably left behind as the “best and brightest” head to the country’s mega-regions. The new economy, insists the Washington Post, favors large cities for start-ups and new businesses. Richard Florida has posited the emergence of a “winner take all urbanism” that tends to favor the richest cities, such as New York and San Francisco.

    However this paradigm may reflect cosmopolitan attitudes and rivalries between large cities more than reality, with its complications and nuances. Smaller cities have long been disadvantaged in their ability to attract the most elite companies and Americans on the move, but that may well be changing. Following a post-financial crisis period in which many domestic migrants headed to the big cities, the latest Census data suggests that the flow is now going the other way, with the native born moving to smaller places with between 500,000 and a million people. The new trend in migration, notes the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, a confirmed big city booster, has been a “great hollowing out,” with Americans leaving places like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco for the suburbs and less costly, usually smaller cities. (Note that at least in New York’s case, foreign immigrants have been taking their places.)

    To be sure, many smaller towns are suffering, and the bottom of our annual survey of employment trends in America’s 421 metro areas is dominated by them, starting with last place Beckley, W.V.; followed by Johnstown, Pa.; Charleston, W.V.; Weirton-Steubenville, Ohio; and Peoria, Illinois. Yet at the same time small city America — which we define as metro areas with less than 150,000 jobs — accounted for seven of the 10 cities where job growth has been the strongest.

    2017 Best Cities Rankings Lists

    Methodology

    Our rankings are based on short-, medium- and long-term job creation, going back to 2005, and factor in momentum — whether growth is slowing or accelerating. We have compiled separate rankings for America’s 70 largest metropolitan statistical areas (those with nonfarm employment over 450,000), as well as medium-size metro areas (between 150,000 and 450,000 nonfarm jobs) and small ones (less than 150,000 nonfarm jobs), the latter two of which are our focus this week, in order to make the comparisons more relevant to each category. (For a detailed description of our methodology, click here).

    The Utah Model

    What makes for successful smaller cities? There’s no simple formula, but several characteristics loom prominently. One is the extent and quality of its amenities: Many of our top cities are in attractive locations near mountains or the ocean, and tend to be home to colleges and universities. And, almost without exception, they are located in less costly, lower-tax states. Finally, it doesn’t hurt to be relatively close to a bigger urban area and a large airport.

    All these characteristics apply to the best metro area for jobs in 2017 — Provo-Orem, Utah. Located an hour south of Salt Lake City and its big airport, the Provo-Orem area has a population of 603,000 and sits alongside the scenic Wasatch Mountains. It’s home to the well-regarded Brigham Young University. Last year the metro area’s job count expanded an impressive 4.4%, and employment is up 29.2% since 2011. As one might suspect in a college-oriented area, the biggest growth has been in fields that tend to hire educated people, such as business and professional services, in which employment grew 5.8% last year, financial services (up 6.7%) and the information sector (plus 5.8%).

    But Provo is not alone in outstanding job growth in the Beehive State. In addition to its largest metro area, Salt Lake City, which ranks 13th, the small city of Saint George ranks third. Also benefiting from a scenic location in the state’s rugged southwestern corner, it’s less of a college town than a retirement and tourism magnet, which explains much of its 5.7% job growth last year. This was driven in large part by big expansions in health and education, with employment in those sectors up 4.6% last year and some 31.8% since 2011.

    Another Utah superstar is 18th-ranked Ogden-Clearfield. Its 2.9% job growth last year was driven in large part by financial services, with employment up 5.7%, and education and health, up 5.9%.

    So what accounts for one relatively small state that’s home to only 3.1% of the U.S. population placing four cities in the top 20? Among the factors: the nation’s fastest population growth, a highly favorable business climate (Gov. Gary Herbert has made cutting red tape a priority of his administration), a burgeoning tech sector and a Mormon-influenced social culture that seems to encourage citizen engagement in local affairs.

    Other Hot Spots

    The other smaller boom towns are a varied lot, although all share locations in low tax, light regulation states. Some bigger cities — San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose — seem to have found a way to keep growing in higher cost environments, but this does not seem to be the case for smaller cities. Virtually all the small communities in our top 20 — with the exception of No. 8 Fort Collins, Colo., — come from such reddish states as the Carolinas, Texas, Idaho and, of course, Utah.

    Most of the fastest-growing metro areas tend to be in what some have called “amenity regions.” This is certainly the case for Ft. Collins, No. 9 Gainesville, Ga., No. 10 The Villages, Fla., and No. 17 Boise, Idaho. Many of these places, notably the Villages, are attractive to retirees and downshifting boomers while others may also lure young families.

    Yet there are some wide differences among our top small cities. Smaller cities often have very distinctive economies dominated by one or two industries. Sixth-ranked Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers, a metropolitan area that sprawls between Missouri and Arkansas, is dominated by two forces, Bentonville-based Walmart, and a burgeoning retirement/tourism sector tied to its location in the scenic Ozarks. The area which enjoyed 3.3% job growth last year, and 20.4% since 2011, was paced by an expanding professional and business services sector, up a sizzling 8.0% last year; other dynamic sectors include financial services, up 4.5% last year, as well as the education and health, which grew 4.0%.

    Charleston-North Charleston, which ranked 4th on our list with a 3.2% job growth rate last year and 17.6% since 2011, epitomizes the new dynamic small cities. Not only does the area boast a charming ante-bellum urban core, and some of the country’s best food, it has also become attractive to companies seeking to lower costs. The city is home to Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner assembly plant and to Mercedes-Benz’s $500 million Charleston plant, which will add 1,300 jobs over the next few years. It is also about to house Volvo’s first North American manufacturing plant – a $500 million investment that could add up to 4,000 jobs home. Charleston has also emerged as something of a millennial draw as well, with the largest percentage of residents aged 25 to 34 of any midsized city.

    2017 Best Cities Rankings Lists

    The Future of Smaller Cities

    In contrast to the conventional wisdom, smaller cities may have a brighter future than many expect. Of course, it’s hard to see a rapid turnaround in some deindustrialized cities, particularly in the Midwest. Many energy-dependent cities are down sharply in our ranking from a year ago, including Baton Rouge, La., which dropped 97 places to 191st, and Bismarck, N.D., which plummeted 119 places to 221st. The Trump administration certainly has made noise about helping the energy industry, but the cold reality of the current global oversupply of oil suggests these places won’t be rebounding much in the near term.

    Right now, prospects seem best for amenity rich areas, in part because they appeal to both aging boomer and younger families. The scenic Pacific Northwest is home to many gainers this year, including Olympia-Tumwater, Wash., which gained as impressive 64 places from last year to 21st, Wenatchee, which rose seven spots to 22nd, and Bellingham, which jumped 100 places to 63rd.

    In the South, the attractive coastal city Wilmington, N.C., rose 76 places to 54th, and the Florida beach towns Northport-Sarasota-Bradenton, climbed 28 spots to 35th while Punta Gorda gained 26 places to 39th.

    The future of smaller American cities, in some senses, parallels that of their larger counterparts. Some areas seem positioned for further growth, while many others are stagnating or even dropping. The small city is far from obsolete, with a good number of them poised to expand strongly in the years ahead.

    This piece originally appeared on Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Dr. Michael Shires primary areas of teaching and research include state, regional and local policy; technology and democracy; higher education policy; strategic, political and organizational issues in public policy; and quantitative analysis. He often serves as a consultant to local and state government on issues related to finance, education policy and governance. Dr. Shires has been quoted as an expert in various publications including USA Today, Newsweek, The Economist, The Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle, and LA Times. He has also appeared as a guest commentator on CNN, KTLA and KCAL to name a few.

    Photo by City of St. George (City of St. George) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Move Over, San Francisco: Dallas Tops Our List Of The Best Cities For Jobs 2017

    Dallas is called the Big D for a reason. Bigger, better, best: that’s the Dallas mindset. From the gigantic Cowboys stadium in Arlington to the burgeoning northern suburbs to the posh arts district downtown, Dallasites are reinventing their metropolis almost daily. The proposed urban park along the Trinity River, my Dallas friends remind me, will be 11 times bigger than New York’s Central Park.

    Here’s something else for them to boast about: the Dallas-Plano-Irving metropolitan area ranks first this year on our list of the Best Cities For Jobs.

    2017 Best Cities Rankings Lists

    It’s a region that in many ways is the polar opposite of the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas, which have dominated our ranking for the last few years. (They still place second and eighth this year, respectively, among the largest 70 metropolitan areas, though San Jose is down sharply from second place last year.)

    Unlike the tech-driven Bay Area, Dallas’ economy has multiple points of strength, including aerospace and defense, insurance, financial services, life sciences, data processing and transportation. Employment in the metro area has expanded 20.3% over the past five years and 4.2% last year, with robust job creation in professional and business services, as well as in a host of lower-paid sectors like retail, wholesale trade and hospitality.

    According to Southern Methodist University’s Klaus Desmet and Collin Clark, Dallas’s success stems in part from the fact that it isn’t looking to appeal to the elite “creative class,” but to middle-class workers and the companies and executives who employ them. Dallas attracts both foreign and domestic migrants, particularly from places like California, where housing is, on an income-adjusted basis, often three times as expensive. This has had much to do with the relocation to the area of such companies as Jacobs Engineering, Toyota, Liberty Mutual and State Farm.

    Methodology

    Our rankings are based on short-, medium- and long-term job creation, going back to 2005, and factor in momentum — whether growth is slowing or accelerating. We have compiled separate rankings for America’s 70 largest metropolitan statistical areas (those with nonfarm employment over 450,000), which are our focus this week, as well as medium-size metro areas (between 150,000 and 450,000 nonfarm jobs) and small ones (less than 150,000 nonfarm jobs) in order to make the comparisons more relevant to each category. (For a detailed description of our methodology, click here.)

    The Rise of Low-Cost Meccas

    Dallas is far bigger (particularly if you add the neighboring 28th-ranked Ft. Worth-Arlington area to the mix) than any of the other metro areas that have prospered by offering cheaper alternatives to coastal cities, with lower taxes and generally more friendly business climates. Among them is No. 3 Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin, Tenn.

    The metro area has seen rapid job growth, nearly 20.6% since 2011. Last year job growth was across the board, including a 4.1% expansion in manufacturing employment, 5.2% in business professional services, and 2.9% in the information sector.

    Like Dallas, Nashville has become a mecca for companies looking to relocate operations. Some, like UBS, are fleeing the high cost of places like New York or London. Others, like Lyft, are escaping high costs in coastal California. CKE Restaurants, owner of Carl’s Junior and Hardees, is moving operations from coastal California and St. Louis to set up shop in Nashville. All are bringing a diverse new range of jobs to the Music City.

    Other low-cost migration meccas include fourth-place Charlotte-Concord, Gastonia, No. 5 Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, and No. 6 Salt Lake City. All boast growing tech centers with rapidly expanding STEM employment, as well as business and professional service growth.

    Boom Towns Get Pricier

    Some thriving metro areas on our list are becoming increasingly expensive, but they still don’t pack the tax and housing punch associated with blue state economies. No. 7 Austin-Round Rock, No. 9 Seattle-Bellevue-Everett and No. 11 Denver-Aurora-Lakewood have been big beneficiaries of the tech boom, and continue to attract migrants from areas like the Bay Area, where housing prices are still twice as high.

    It’s possible for older large cities with strongholds in key industries to generate strong job growth. New York’s population growth in 2016 may be half of what was in 2010, but financial sector job growth and associated professional service firms enable the Big Apple to rank a respectable 25th. Another high-cost area, Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, with its unparalleled concentration of elite colleges, ranks 30th.

    The picture is not so pretty in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, a region whose housing costs are almost as high as the Bay Area, with the same onerous state regulatory and tax burdens. It ranks 40th this year, with anemic 1.2% job growth in professional and business services over the past three years and 4% in financial services. The L.A. area continues to bleed manufacturing jobs, down 2.1% in the last year and 4.6% since 2013. Even retail and wholesale trade showed weakness in 2016, growing at a lowly 0.7% and 1.7% rate, respectively. The Information sector, highlighted by Snapchat’s splashy IPO, made the best showing for Tinseltown, with employment rising 4.2% in the last year. The sector, which includes entertainment, has seen employment expand an impressive 20.9% since the bottom of the recession in 2011.

    As has been the case almost every year in this millennium, the super-sized metro area doing worst is Chicago. It ranks 51st this year, down four places. Since the Great Recession, Chicago has managed modest job growth of 8.3%, and only a weak 0.7% expansion in 2016. Despite an uptick in financial services jobs over the past two years, and some ballyhooed relocations of corporate headquarters, the metro area has been losing jobs in information, manufacturing, and wholesale trade. Business services was up a scant 0.5% in the last year.

    Demographic Change and Changing Momentum

    The resurgence of expensive areas — notably New York and the San Francisco area — has been propelled largely by demographic trends, notably the movement of highly educated millennials to these areas. Yet as millennials begin to enter their 30s, and seek to buy homes and raise families, the momentum may be turning decisively to regions that are both less expensive but still have considerable appeal to educated workers. Most of the big gainers this year – Dallas, Orlando, Salt Lake, Raleigh, and No. 24 Indianapolis – have developed better inner-city amenities in recent years while keeping housing costs low.

    This shift is being driven in large part by unsustainable housing costs. In the Bay Area, techies are increasingly looking for jobs outside the tech hub, and some companies are even offering cash bonuses for those willing to leave. A recent poll indicated that 46% of Millennials want to leave the San Francisco Bay Area.

    It seems that some areas located in pro-business, low-tax states are increasingly attracting the educated millennials that we usually associate with places like San Francisco, Brooklyn or West L.A. Since 2010, among educated millennials, the fastest growth in migration has been to such lower-cost regions as Atlanta, Orlando, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth.

    Over time, this migration could restructure the geography of job growth. As the middle class, particularly those of child-bearing age, continue moving out of states like California and into states like Texas. Utah or The Carolinas, the geography of skills changes. New families, a critical engine of job growth, are far more likely to form in Salt Lake City, the four large Texas metropolitan areas, or Atlanta, than in the bluest metropolitan areas like New York, Seattle, Los Angeles or San Francisco, where the number of school-age children trend well below the national average.

    Ultimately, we may be on the cusp of a new economic era in which the cost of housing and living becomes once again a key determinant in regional growth. This trend has been developing for years, but both demographics, notably the aging of millennials, and out of control costs could accelerate it. Many areas may wish to somehow emerge as “the new Silicon Valley,” just as they wished once to be the next “Wall Street” or “Hollywood.” Yet these iconic economies are difficult, to impossible, to duplicate. It might make more sense instead to look the success of places like Dallas — where lower costs are luring companies and talent at a level unrivaled in the nation.

    This piece originally appeared on Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Dr. Michael Shires primary areas of teaching and research include state, regional and local policy; technology and democracy; higher education policy; strategic, political and organizational issues in public policy; and quantitative analysis. He often serves as a consultant to local and state government on issues related to finance, education policy and governance. Dr. Shires has been quoted as an expert in various publications including USA Today, Newsweek, The Economist, The Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle, and LA Times. He has also appeared as a guest commentator on CNN, KTLA and KCAL to name a few.

    Photo by Diann Bayes, obtained via Flickr using a CC License.

  • Welcome To Y’all Street: The Cities Challenging New York For Financial Supremacy

    From the earliest days of the Republic, banking and finance has largely been the purview of what one historian calls the “Yankee Empire.” Based largely in New York and Boston, later on financial centers grew along the main route of Yankee migration to Chicago and San Francisco.

    Yet, if you look at where financial jobs are now headed, perhaps it’s time, as the Dallas Morning News cheekily suggested recently, to substitute Y’all Street for Wall Street. Finance, increasingly conducted electronically, is no longer tethered to its traditional centers. Large global financial companies like UBS, Deutsche Bank , Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are all committed to relocating operations to less expensive locations.

    In the U.S., this has benefited the South the most. This year’s list of the metro areas that are increasing employment in financial services at the fastest rate is led by first-place Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin, Tenn., No. 2 Dallas-Plano-Irving, Texas, No. 4 Austin-Round Rock, Texas, and No. 5 Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia N.C.-S.C.

    Financial service employment is important, particularly since the recovery from the 2008 financial meltdown. The industry is second in the U.S. only to the professional and business services sector in terms of the number of people it employs in high-paying jobs (average salary: $62,860), and its recent growth has been spread across the country. Of the 70 large metro areas we studied, only three have lost financial jobs since 2010.

    Methodology

    To generate our ranking, we looked at employment growth in the 366 metropolitan statistical areas for which BLS has complete data going back to 2005, weighting growth over the short-, medium- and long-term in that span, and factoring in momentum — whether growth is slowing or accelerating. (For a detailed description of our methodology, click here.)

    The South Rises Again

    The shift to the South seems to be based on several factors: lower costs (including for housing), less regulation and expanding markets, driven by rapid population growth. As population has shifted to the South, most notably low-tax states like Tennessee and Texas, it has clearly increased local demand for financial services. But there’s also another factor: the migration of financial jobs from traditional centers such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

    Our top emerging financial superstar, Nashville, has all these characteristics.

    Since 2010, the area’s financial workforce has expanded 24.5 percent to 60,900. Population growth and in-migration rates have been spectacular.

    Between 2010 and 2014, in-migration accounted for 65.4 percent of local population growth, the fifth highest proportion among the nation’s top 25 metro areas that added more than 100,000 people, while the overall population soared 10 percent.  Since the recession ended in 2009, employment has grown 21 percent while per capita income has risen 4 percent. Financial sector growth has come from firms with U.S. headquarters in the New York area, such as Switzerland-based UBS, as well as from locally based financial firms, like the investment bank Avondale Partners.

    But the biggest raw job gains, as we also found in professional and business services, are in No. 2 Dallas-Plano-Irving, where financial employment has expanded 23.2 percent since 2010 to 226,100 jobs, making the metro area the third-biggest financial services hub in the nation behind New York and Chicago. If the adjacent Ft. Worth area is added in, the region boasts a total of 282,000 financial job, behind only New York. Unlike Houston, slowed by the oil industry downturn, Dallas is on a super-sized roll.

    The Big D’s drive to become “y’all street” also stems from the recipe of large-scale population growth, low taxes, affordable housing and business friendliness. Large corporate relocations, such as Toyota from California, creates new demand both from business and consumers.

    To be sure, a New Yorker could scoff at the idea of Dallas replacing Manhattan as a financial center as something akin to the old Texas insult: all hat and no cattle. Yet it might behoove uppity Gothamites to pay more attention to the big Texas metroplex. The area’s dispersed financial institutions may not look like those associated with Manhattan, but they are growing more quickly, and in a place where middle managers can thrive on modest salaries. Then there’s the advantages of its central location, one of the things that led Comerica to move its headquarters to Dallas in 2007. More recently, State Farm and Liberty Mutual have opened large operations in the northern suburbs.

    But it’s not just Texas and Tennessee that are dominating the dispersion of financial services jobs. Before the recession, No. 5 Charlotte, N.C., had risen to become the second-largest financial center in the country, home to Bank of America and Wachovia. Wachovia fell hard in the financial crisis, and was swallowed by Wells Fargo, but BofA soldiers on, and the area clearly has recovered from the recession doldrums. Since 2010, the metro area’s financial workforce has grown 14.2 percent to 86,100 jobs, with 5 percent growth last year alone.

    The Rise Of The Mormon Belt?

    Outside the south, the other big growth area for financial services lies in the Intermountain West, the vast region between California’s Sierras and the Rockies. Two metro areas stand out in terms of financial growth: No. 3 Salt Lake City area and No. 6 Phoenix. Like the Texas cities, these metro areas offer middle managers a huge housing advantage; home prices, adjusted for incomes, are roughly half those in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

    Salt Lake City’s financial services job count has grown 19.9 percent since 2010 to 55,200 jobs, with 6.2 percent growth last year alone. The Utah capital has gained particular renown as Goldman Sachs’fourth-largest global hub, and is slated to keep growing. Particularly attractive for Goldman is the language skills of returning Mormon missionaries.

    Rapid financial growth is now common across the “Mormon belt” that stretches from Arizona to Idaho. Among mid-sized metro areas (those with less than 450,000 nonfarm jobs),  Boise ranks second for financial services job growth, followed byProvo-Orem, Utah, and No. 5 Clearfield-Ogden. With young and well-educated workforce, and relatively low (particularly compared to California) housing prices, these areas are creating a whole new archipelago of financial centers.

    At the southern end of the Mormon belt sits Phoenix. Like the southern financial boom towns, the Valley of the Sun is booming both demographically and in terms of jobs; financial positions are up 19.7 percent since 2010.

    Much of this follows the movement of people from other parts of the country, notably California and the Midwest. Financial companies, too, are migrating south such as Chicago-based Northern Trust, which moved 1,000 jobs last year to Tempe, a close in Phoenix suburb. Growth in financial services has helped bring some life back to the long torpid office market, attracting new investors.

    The Big Boys

    Despite the growth in the top cities on our list, the central position of New York remains unassailable. After hard times amid the financial crisis, employment has risen a modest 6.3 percent since 2010 to 461,500, over 200,000 more than second-place Chicago, and salaries are on the rise again.

    What has changed is where the challenges may come from. Its onetime main rivals, 56th place Chicago-Naperville- Arlington Heights and Los Angeles (57th) are not even keeping pace, and seem destined to fall even further behind. Similarly,  other likely financial rivals, like No. 21 San Francisco-Redwood City-South San Francisco, No. 39 Boston-Cambridge-Newton or No. 49 Seattle-Bellevue-Everett aren’t growing fast enough to mount a major challenge.

    If New York’s supremacy is to be challenged, it will instead likely be from the lower-cost places that dominate our list in the South and Intermountain West. With the exception of Dallas, no single one of these metro areas could conceivably grow to be big enough to threaten Gotham’s leadership, but over time they could in aggregate weaken its predominance, spreading financial power to what are largely relatively youthful financial centers.

    This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Michael Shires, Ph.D. is a professor at Pepperdine University School of Public Policy.

  • The U.S. Cities Creating The Most White-Collar Jobs, 2016

    The information sector may have glamour and manufacturing, nostalgia appeal, but the real action in high-wage job growth in the United States is in the vast realm of professional and business services. This is not only the largest high-wage part of the economy, employing just under 20 million people at an average salary of $30 an hour, it’s also one the few high-wage sectors in which employment has expanded steadily since 2010, at more than 3% a year, adding nearly 3 million white-collar jobs.

    In many ways, the business and professional service sector may be the best indicator of future U.S. economic growth. It is not nearly as vulnerable to disruption as energy, manufacturing or information employment, and more deeply integrated into the economy, including professions like administrative services and management, legal services, scientific research, and computer systems and design.  In a pattern we have seen in other sectors, much of the growth is concentrated in two very different kinds of places: tech-rich metro areas and those that offer lower costs, and often more business-friendly atmospheres.

    To generate our rankings of the best places for business services jobs, we looked at employment growth in the 366 metropolitan statistical areas for which BLS has complete data going back to 2005, weighting growth over the short-, medium- and long-term in that span, and factoring in momentum — whether growth is slowing or accelerating. (For a detailed description of our methodology, click here.)

    Tech Strikes Again

    There is a growing confluence between technology and business services, as more companies use the Internet to conduct commerce.

    This can be seen in several of our top-ranked large cities. Business service employment in the San Francisco-Redwood City-South San Francisco MSA has grown a remarkable 45% since 2010, placing it second on our list, slightly faster than third-ranked Austin-Round Rock, which clocked 42% growth over the same span, and No. 4 San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, where business services employment expanded 36%.

    It’s questionable whether this pattern will continue, particularly in the high-cost Bay Area. There are signs of a slowdown in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, with more space being subleased and property prices seeming to have peaked, albeit at extraordinary high levels. In contrast the future for less expensive areas — increasingly attractive to millennials as well as companies — may be far brighter, as companies shift employment to places their employees can live decently.

    Resurgence In Middle America

    This pattern can be seen in the balance of our top-performing regions. It starts with our top-ranked metro area, Nashville, Tenn., which has seen business service employment grow 47.2% since 2010 to 152,700 jobs, with 7.7% growth last year alone. Some of this comes from the establishment of branch offices of Silicon Valley companies like Lyft and Everbright, as well as the expansion of the area’s strong health care and entertainment industries.

    Nashville’s appeal to millennials is unsurpassed, with the strongest growth rate in net migration of college-educated people aged 25-34 of any metro area in the country, and the reasons are not hard to find. It’s a charming city located in a temperate part of the country, with both excellent, and affordable, urban and suburban options.

    But if Nashville is the belle of the business service ball, fifth-ranked Dallas-Ft. Worth is now the beast. The Texas powerhouse’s business services workforce has expanded 28.9% since 2010 to 458,200. The Dallas-Ft. Worth area has plenty of appeal to big companies with a large cohort of middle-income managers, as a paper to be published this fall by Southern Methodist University’s Klaus Desmet and Cullum Clark well describes. These jobs pay well enough to live well in Dallas’ nicer suburbs, such as Plano and Frisco, but not remotely enough to buy a house, or even a condo, in Los Angeles, San Francisco or New York.

    This accounts, in part, for the relocation of Toyota America’s headquarters from Torrance, Calif., to the north Dallas suburbs, and likely plays a role in the plans of Jacobs Engineering, a longtime fixture in Pasadena, to relocate its headquarters to downtown Dallas.

    In many ways, argues urban analyst Aaron Renn, Dallas is becoming the new Chicago. It is anchored by a large airport, a diverse economy and a location in the middle of country. Even as downtown Chicago has attracted some notable new corporate headquarters in recent years, these generally employ relatively few people, while companies that need access to a large white-collar workforce, like Toyota and Jacobs, have been gravitating to the Big D.

    How About The Big Boys?

    As manufacturing has declined in our largest cities, professional and business services have become the prime generator of high-end jobs. Yet among the country’s largest business service centers there is a growing divergence between the winners and laggards.

    The most impressive performance among metro areas with over 500,000 business and professional service jobs has been New York. With 714,000 business service jobs, the Big Apple is without question the leader in the field, but more importantly it continues to grow. Since 2010, New York has grown its professional and business service employment by an impressive 22%, helping it rank 14th on our list. This reflects the city’s continued preeminence in such fields as law, design, marketing, public relations and advertising.

    But the other traditional business service leaders have not fared nearly as well. Gotham’s traditional rival, Chicago-Naperville-Arlington Heights, still has 673,000 business service jobs but has seen only a modest growth just under 15%, ranking 43rd. Whatever may have been gained in generally small scale “executive headquarters” has not been enough to make the vast Chicagoland region a big winner.

    Things are even less positive in 60th place Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, the third largest business service area. Since 2010, its 13.8% growth is well below the national average. Nor is the slack in the Southland being picked up by the area’s sprawling suburbs, with Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine ranking a modest 39th and San Bernardino-Riverside clocking in at 52nd. The Bay Area business services world may be still booming, but south of the Tehachapi, progress is slow.

    Will Business Services Continue To Disperse?

    Those who suggest dense concentrations have efficiencies that overcome higher costs can take some solace from our numbers, but not too much. Many of the fastest growing business service centers are hardly paragons of dense urbanism, including No. 7 Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, Fla., and No. 8 Richmond, Va., where employment jumped 10% last year. Even sprawling Atlanta, which has lost some of its ‘90s era luster, is now growing its business service sector at a faster pace than New York and light years ahead of much denser Chicago and Los Angeles. It ranks 13th.

    The shift to less expensive places seems certain to continue, in part due to the growing role of Internet communications, which breaks down formerly insurmountable distance barriers. Looking at the full list of the 366 metro areas we examined, the fastest-growers include many smaller communities, led by overall No. 1 New Bedford, Mass., where business services employment has grown 58.5% since 2010 to 6,200 jobs, as well as No. 3 Monroe, Mich., No. 4 Lake Charles, La., and No. 6 Lawton, Okla.

    Essentially business service growth seems destined to break down into three types: (1) large and expensive metro areas — San Francisco-Silicon Valley and New York — whose economic dynamism is strong enough to counter high costs; (2) less expensive, but still large metros such as Nashville, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Richmond and a host of Florida cities that can be expected to garner a lion’s share of the new growth; and (3) smaller communities where business service sector jobs, particularly at the lower end, may be increasingly attracted as employers pursue an affordable quality of life. While the short term has favored the largest cities, the long term is pointing toward more migration to midsized and smaller destinations.

    This piece first appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Michael Shires, Ph.D. is a professor at Pepperdine University School of Public Policy.

    Photograph: Downtown Nashville from BigStockPhoto.com

  • The U.S. Cities Where Manufacturing Is Thriving

    Perhaps no sector in the U.S. economy generates more angst than manufacturing. Over the past quarter century, manufacturing has hemorrhaged over 5 million jobs. The devastation of many regional economies, particularly in the Midwest, is testament to this decline. If the information sector has been the golden child of the media, manufacturing has been the offspring that we pity but can’t comfortably embrace.

    Yet manufacturing remains critically important. Over the period from 1997 to 2012, labor productivity growth in manufacturing—3.3% per year—was a third higher than the rest of the economy. Clearly manufacturing is no technological laggard, accounting in 2012 for 68.9% of all R&D expenditures by U.S. businesses and employing 36% of the nation’s scientists and engineers, the largest share of any industry.

    So even as employment has declined or stagnated, the impact of manufacturing on local economies remains profound. Manufacturing has the highest multiplier effect of any sector of the economy. According to the Commerce Department, a dollar of final demand for manufacturing generates $1.33 in output from other sectors of the economy, considerably higher than the multiplier for information ($0.80) and more than twice as high as such fields as retail trade ($0.66) and business services ($0.61). Other estimates place this impact far higher.

    The Midwest Revival

    Our list of the fastest-growing manufacturing regions differs considerably from our rankings of the best cities for jobs overall, and of the strongest information economies. To avoid the distortions and wild swings that can occur in economies with few industrial jobs, we focused on the 48 metropolitan statistical areas with at least 50,000 manufacturing positions.

    As with our other rankings in this series, the list is based on employment growth in the sector over the short-, medium- and long-term, going back to 2005, and we factor in momentum — whether growth is slowing or accelerating. (For a detailed description of our methodology, click here.)

    Manufacturing has enjoyed something of a renaissance since 2009 — after 12 years of declines, it has gained back 828,000 jobs. But like everything in economics, or life, the resurgence has not been equally distributed. In sharp contrast to other areas of the economy, the industrial heartland has some real winners.

    Grand Rapids-Wyoming, Mich., has boosted its industrial workforce by 29% since 2010 to 110,800 workers, with 5.4% job growth last year alone, placing it first on our list. This growth has been very diversified, with many specialty firms engaged not only in auto parts, but also food, aerospace and defense. The metro area seems to be breaking all the shibboleths ascribed to the “Rust Belt” — unemployment dropped to 3.3% this year, population growth and the birthrate are now well above the national average. For most of our strongest manufacturing economies, however, the real driver has been the recent resurgence in automobile sales, which are now at record levels. Despite all the talk of “peak car” a few years ago, with oil prices in the dumps and the population now once again headed to lower-density areas, driving hit a new peak in 2015 in terms of total vehicle miles traveled.

    The next four fastest-growing industrial areas are all auto-dependent, led by second-ranked Elkhart-Goshen, Ind., where the big business is the highly cyclical recreational vehicle industry. Since 2010, industrial employment has grown 37% in the area to 60,500 jobs.

    In No. 3 Louisville/Jefferson County, which abuts the border of Indiana and Kentucky, the industrial workforce has expanded 25.6% since 2010 to 60,500 jobs. Like Grand Rapids, its base is widely diversified. The largest industrial employers include Ford, which makes pickup trucks and SUVs at two plants in the area; GE Appliances, whose sale to China’s Haier was just completed; Publishers Printing and spirits maker Brown-Forman Corp.

    But the big story, and the big numbers, are in the greater Detroit area, where there are roughly 240,000 manufacturing jobs. About 149,000 of them are in suburban Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, also known as “automation alley,” where the area’s industrial workforce has expanded by 30.6% since 2010, helping it to a fifth-place showing on our list. In fourth place is Detroit-Dearborn-Livonia, where industrial employment surged 27% since 2010.

    High-Tech Centers Rebound

    Although their growth rates are roughly half those of the auto stars that dominate the top of the list, there has been a healthy recovery in manufacturing jobs in traditional high-tech and aerospace-dominated economies, mostly in the west. No. 6 San Diego-Carlsbad, which, like most metro areas, has lost industrial employment over the past decade, has seen a bit of a rebound since 2010, with an 11.5% expansion to 106,700 jobs concentrated mostly in aerospace and nondurable goods.

    No. 7 Denver-Aurora-Lakewood’s industrial workforce has grown 12.7% since 2010 and 3.7% last year alone, while No. 10 Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, Ore.-Wash., where Intel recently completed an expansion, has posted industrial job growth of 12.4% since 2010. A $3 billion plant in suburban Hillsboro has spurred a migration of suppliers as well.

    Despite concerns about the loss of electronics manufacturing to Asia, there has even been a small surge in industrial employment in high-cost, highly regulated Silicon Valley. After losing tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the wake of the bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2000, No. 19 San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara has seen a modest 5.9% upsurge in industrial employment since 2010, helped by the growth of electric vehicle maker Tesla, which now employs about 15,000. The Valley will likely never be the industrial powerhouse it was in decades past (today’s manufacturing employment of 161,900 is still 38% lower than the peak in 2000), but, as firms seek to marry digital technology into the “internet of things,” the area may still continue to produce some real goods, likely before any mass production phase, for the foreseeable future.

    The Big Losers: Los Angeles And Chicago

    A large number of manufacturing-rich areas are continuing to lose industrial jobs, often at a rapid rate. Nearly a third of the 100 largest manufacturing metro areas registered declines in employment in the last two years. This year’s worst performer is Newark, N.J., where manufacturing employment is off almost 4% since 2013 and more than 6% since 2010.

    Perhaps even more disturbing has been the decline of the nation’s two largest agglomerations of industrial jobs, No. 43 Chicago-Naperville-Arlington Heights and No. 27 Los Angeles-Long Beach. Chicago’s decline can be traced, at least in part, to the decline of its traditional industries, such as steel and metal fabrication. For decades, many of these jobs have disappeared, moved south or abroad, and the decline continues,  with  jobs down nearly 1.7% since 2010. Since 1990, the area has lost a remarkable 45% of its industrial jobs.

    But if Chicago’s loss can be attributed to the overall decline of the old industrial base, Los Angeles’ steady losses have come from a more modern mix of aerospace, design and specialty manufacturing. Since 2010 — despite the rapid growth in many manufacturing areas — Los Angeles has managed to lose an additional 3.37% of its industrial jobs. Over the past 25 years, the Big Orange has seen its once thriving industrial base fall from 785,400 to 356,100 jobs—a decline of almost 55%. In both Chicago and Los Angeles, the decline of manufacturing has accompanied demographic stagnation, high rates of poverty and mediocre overall job growth.

    Does Manufacturing Actually Matter?

    In many ways, the answer to that question depends on who you are and the structure of your local economy. To be sure, the San Francisco metro area (San Francisco-Redwood City-South San Francisco), despite a mere 35,500 industrial jobs, too few to even make our list, has transformed its economy so dramatically that the loss of industry seems to have had little impact. New York, once a manufacturing mecca, makes the list at No. 30, but now has barely 78,900 industrial jobs. Yet the city continues to outperform most other large metro areas in terms of overall job growth.

    In places where other sectors such as information or business services have picked up the slack, the overall impact has not led to regional decline. The old blue collar workforce may have suffered, but the shift to a post-industrial future has not been disastrous for the overall economy.

    But few places are as glamorous or alluring as New York or San Francisco, with their appeal to the highly educated, foreign capital and millennial workers. As we can see in Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as many places in the middle of the country, manufacturing still matters, and its decline, or resurgence, remains an issue of paramount importance.

    This piece first appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Michael Shires, Ph.D. is a professor at Pepperdine University School of Public Policy.

  • The Cruel Information Economy: The U.S. Cities Winning In This Critical Sector

    Arguably the most critical industry in the new economy, information is also often the cruelest. It is the ultimate disruptor of jobs and growth, blessing some regional economies but leaving most in the dust. Overall, the sector accounts for almost 3 million jobs, but it has only added a paltry net 70,000 jobs over the last five years. The overall numbers mask a loss of about 200,000 jobs in newspapers, book publishing, broadcasting and telecommunications, while employment in software publishing, data processing and other tech-driven information jobs has expanded by a modest 240,000 jobs (manufacturing, by comparison, has produced three times that amount in the same period).

    Our rankings for the best cities for information jobs are perhaps the most skewed of any occupational category. With more traditional industries like business services, hospitality and construction, employment tends to rise across all the country’s metropolitan areas, if not at the same pace everywhere. In the case of the information sector, the vast majority of the metropolitan statistical areas for which we have data have lost information jobs since 2010 (204 out of 336 MSAs).

    Yet there are clear winners in the information sweepstakes, with a handful of metro areas that have seized the initiative in the field and run with it.

    Information, particularly its media segment, has shown a strong proclivity to concentrate in a handful of places. Whether it’s a matter of where venture funds are concentrated, or that cross-fertilization and creative flair are driving this, it’s hard to say. But in the emerging digital economy, notes a recent Neiman study, clusters industries in the places where creators of content live. For the most part, as of yet, blue collar metro areas need not apply.

    Info-Age Winners

    Our rankings are based on employment growth in the sector over the short-, medium- and long-term, going back to 2005, and factor in momentum — whether growth is slowing or accelerating. (For a detailed description of our methodology, click here.)

    At the top of our list of the largest metropolitan statistical areas, not surprisingly, is San Francisco-Redwood City-South San Francisco. Since 2010, led by the growth of such companies as Twitter, Facebook and Salesforce.com, the metro area’s information employment has expanded 62% to 61,000 jobs. The pace of growth is slowing, to 6.85% last year, but still very healthy.

    Right behind San Francisco is the larger information-based economy of its neighbor Silicon Valley. The San Jose metro area, home to such information economy titans as Google and Netflix, has 76,000 information jobs, up a none-too-shabby 57.4% since 2010; last year its 9.3% job growth rate outstripped even San Francisco. Together these two areas have emerged as the superstars of the information age, and no other large metro is really close in terms of growth.

    Yet the information boom has other epicenters that have emerged over the past decade. Among the large metro areas, Seattle-Bellevue-Everett ranks seventh on our list. It boasts 98,000 information jobs, third most in the country behind much larger New York and Los Angeles. Since 2010 the Puget Sound powerhouse, home to Microsoft, Amazon and a host of start-ups, has seen its information employment expand a healthy 15.3%.

    Seattle’s little brother, Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, Ore., ranks eighth. Since 2010 Portland’s information employment has grown over 12% to 25,500 workers.

    Among the very largest of our metro areas, New York has managed fairly impressive growth in its media-dominated information sector, with employment expanding 12.1% since 2010 to 191,000 workers, second in total numbers, and with no sign of growth flagging.

    It’s doing much better than the Big Apple’s two traditional rivals, Chicago and Los Angeles. The Windy City and its environs have expanded information employment by 5% since 2010 to with 73,100 jobs, placing it 19th. Los Angeles follows in 20th place. L.A. is home to the largest information sector in the U.S., with 203,800 workers, but despite its well-established base, much of it in entertainment, it has managed only 3.5% growth since 2010.

    Will Information Jobs Head To The Sun Belt?

    The growth of information employment in large, dense and expensive urban areas, notably New York and San Francisco, has been widely celebrated by advocates of traditional cities. Yet this same pattern also developed in the last tech bubble in the late 1990s, and then reversed as companies collapsed, and many of the survivors moved operations to less expensive regions.

    Could we see a repeat now? High housing costs are putting homeownership out of reach even for fairly affluent families in San Francisco and New York. Already some tech workers are relocating to lower-cost areas. Many more may do so in the future, suggests a recent Beacon Economics study, or resign themselves to being permanent renters.

    This year’s list may show some of the places both tech and information jobs may be headed in the next few years. The clear rising star is Phoenix, which ranks third. The desert city’s information workforce has expanded by 39.29% since 2010, the third highest increase of any metropolitan area, just behind the Bay Area twins. In recent years a growing list of Bay Area firms have expanded into the Valley of the Sun, including DoubleDutch, Gainsight, Uber, Prosper Marketplace, Yelp, Weebly, BoomTown and Shutterfly. Silicon Valley Bank set up shop there five years ago as well.

    Other lower-cost locales are also doing well on our big metro list, including No. 4 Raleigh, N.C., No. 5 Austin-Round Rock, Texas,  and No. 10 Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. All have enjoyed double-digit information job growth since 2010.

    Although information jobs tend to concentrate in bigger metros, there are several smaller metro areas that appear to be on the cusp of becoming key hubs for the industry. The fastest growth over the past five years has been in Provo-Orem, Utah, where information employment has expanded 43.8% to 11,400 jobs. Other fast-rising smaller stars include Flagstaff, Ariz.,  Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C.,  Madison, Wisc., Bend-Redmond, Ore., and Portsmouth, N.H. All these metro areas have enjoyed information job growth of 20% or more since 2010, albeit off small bases.

    The Likely Future of Information Growth

    Clearly information jobs cluster, although they do so in varied kinds of environments. To be sure, the biggest players likely will continue to be in the largest cities, notably in the Bay Area, New York, Seattle and, as long as Hollywood stays strong, Southern California as well. But the high prices in these areas seem to be leading to growth in a host of second-tier cities spread from Florida to Arizona, where tech workers can enjoy a combination of lower home costs and at least some urban amenities.

    Similarly, while most smaller cities may never become information hubs, some clearly will. For the most part these will be either university towns such as Chapel Hill (home to the University of North Carolina), Provo-Orem (Brigham Young) and Madison (University of Wisconsin). Other will be located in amenity-rich, scenic areas like Flagstaff and Bend, Ore., where outdoor-oriented tech workers may find a way to work remotely from the big city hubs.

    But under any foreseeable future, it’s unlikely that information job growth will be strong enough to help in a measurable way the fortunes of most communities. Traditional advantages in terms of taxes, location on rivers or the ocean, or access to cheap energy is simply not enough to lure these jobs to a wide array of locales. Information may be a stellar force in some areas, but it has very picky tastes that preclude it from being as transformative in job creation as it is in our daily lives.

    This piece first appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Michael Shires, Ph.D. is a professor at Pepperdine University School of Public Policy.

  • The Best Small And Medium-Size Cities For Jobs 2016

    When we look at how the U.S. economy is performing, we usually focus on the largest metropolitan areas. But some 29% of non-farm jobs in the U.S. are in small and midsize metro areas. And since they tend to be less economically diverse and more volatile, these metro areas often are where we can more clearly see the fissures in the economy — the sectors that are growing, and which are shrinking.

    In this year’s edition of our Best Cities For Jobs survey, 13 of the 20 metro areas with the fastest job growth are small (under 150,000 total nonfarm jobs) and medium-sized (between 150,000 and 450,000 total nonfarm jobs).

    Many of the smaller places creating jobs at the fastest pace are located in booming regions like the Intermountain West, near college towns and in regions with attractive natural amenities. Meanwhile, times are turning tougher in West Texas and other energy-dependent areas.

    The winners and losers also reflect demographic trends, notably the tsunami of downshifting boomers, that will shape our society and economy for years to come.

    The Utah Superstars

    As is the case with larger areas, it usually helps if a smaller region has more than one economic pillar. This is certainly true for our No. 1 city overall, St. George, Utah. The job count in this metro area has grown a remarkable 32 percent since 2010. Last year St. George’s job growth rate was 7 percent, roughly 3.5 times faster than the national rate, and one reason the area leaped 30 places in our overall rankings from last year.

    Located in the scenic southwestern part of the state near the Arizona border, and a magnet for retirees and tourists, St. George has had a remarkable population boom, growing from fewer than 100,000 residents in 2000 to 155,600 people as of 2015.

    This demographic surge can be seen where you would expect it, with rapid growth in construction sector jobs – up over 50 percent since 2010 — as well as leisure and hospitality, where employment expanded 37.8 percent over the same span.

    Yet this is not just a sleepy retirement and tourist town. The metro area has a median age of 32, three years older than the Utah average, but well below the national average of 37.2. Despite this younger demographic, job growth has occurred in sectors that tend to employ older workers, such as manufacturing, up 40.9 percent since 2010, and professional business services, up 34.6 percent.

    Not surprisingly if you want to find other local economies that reflect this kind of dynamic, the best place to look is elsewhere in the Beehive State. Our second-ranked area nationally, Provo-Orem has also achieved rapid job growth, with employment expanding 27.4 percent since 2010. Like St. George, this metro area has enjoyed strong growth in construction and hospitality, but also in higher-wage fields, including information, which has expanded employment 43.9 percent since 2010, and professional business services, up 34.3 percent.

    Home to Brigham Young University, the Harvard of Mormondom, the metro area is among the youngest in the nation, largely due to large Mormon families. It’s also, according to Gallup, the most religious as well as one of the best educated: almost 40 percent of its population over 25 holds bachelor’s degrees and almost 5 percent have advanced degrees, just ahead of San Jose, Calif., and Nashville, Tenn.

    Also placing highly from Utah is No. 15 Ogden-Clearfield, which rose 25 notches over last year. Employment has expanded 16.2 percent since 2010. Like St. George and Provo-Orem, this region has experienced strong expansion in its construction and hospitality sectors, but also boasts great economic diversity. Since 2010, manufacturing employment has grown 10.4 percent while professional business service jobs have expanded a healthy 31.3 percent.

    The Amenity Regions

    Of course, you don’t have to be a Latter Day Saint to have a successful small city. But it helps a great deal if you happen to be in a place that has standout natural and cultural amenities. This trend may be greatly enhanced by the movement of seniors, particularly affluent ones, to what may be called “amenity regions” throughout the country. Contrary to the urban mythology pressed by the mainstream media, Census data shows that seniors are not moving “back to the city” in great numbers but generally to smaller, less dense regions, if they move at all.

    Being in a nice place, of course, is an asset for any city; after all, entrepreneurs and young families also like to live somewhere good times beckon. At the same time, some of these areas also benefit from a strong hospitality and second home market. Another critical advantage belongs to college towns which, by their very nature, usually offer more by way of arts, restaurants and entertainment than other places.

    The highest ranked of these metro areas this year is Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers, AR-MO, which comes in sixth on our overall list. It enjoys the benefits of being home to the University of Arkansas as well as close to the Ozark Mountains, one of the premier recreation areas in middle America. Since 2010, employment in the metro area has jumped 19.6 percent, or 40,000 jobs, with a 4.7 percent expansion last year. Like other top small cities, the areas has enjoyed strong growth in construction and hospitality jobs, up 37.2 percent since 2010, but also professional and business services, which expanded 38.2 percent over the same time period.

    Some other of the fastest-growing areas metro are tourism and retirement destinations on the tech-rich West Coast. Five years ago, Napa, Calif., and Bend-Redmond, Wash., were mired toward the bottom of our ranking in 344th and 36rd place, respectively. But as the coastal tech economies have surged, so have they, rising to 13th and 14th place this year. Hospitality and construction have been the big job gainers for both, with some jobs added in professional services as well.

    Losing Ground In The Oil Patch

    As tech-linked areas ascend, many energy-producing towns are slipping, with oil and gas prices in the dumps and the coal industry racked by the government-guided transition to cleaner forms of power production.

    West Virginia’s metropolitan areas have all suffered major declines on our list, with Wheeling dropping 54 places from last year’s survey to 396th on a 0.7 percent contraction in employment on the year. In Charleston, W.V., which has fallen to five spots from the bottom of our list, mining and natural resources employment declined 9.8 percent last year and is off 31.5 percent since 2010. Big job losses have occurred also in Wyoming, a major coal producing area, where Cheyenne dropped 82 places to 206th as mining and natural resources employment contracted 6.2 percent last year.

    Many once red-hot areas in the oil patch have taken devastating hits. Former high-flyer Victoria, Texas, dropped from 24th place last year to 115th. But no place reflects the flagging fortunes of the West Texas energy economy more than Midland, which, just last year ranked first on our list; this year it’s at 139th after losing 14.7 percent of its natural resources jobs and 6.9 percent of its jobs overall. Odessa fell from third last year to 173rd this year on the back of an 8.8 percent contraction in employment, and 20.4 percent in the natural resources sector.

    Several Louisiana metro areas have suffered steep job losses, including Houma-Thibodaux, down 183 places on our list to 325th after an 8 percent contraction in employment. Several smaller Oklahoma communities have taken serious hits, including Tulsa, which dropped to 222nd. Bismarck, N.D., a prime beneficiary of the Bakken oil boom, dropped 67 places from last year to 102nd as 6.8 percent of its natural resources jobs evaporated, while Bakersfield, Calif., one of the country’s largest oil producing areas dropped 70 places to 109th as natural resources employment contracted 11.5 percent.

    The Rust Belt: Is The Bounce Back Over?

    The picture is less uniform in the industrial sector than in energy. Some manufacturing-oriented areas are booming, such as No. 4 Gainesville, Ga., and No. 10 Columbus, Ind., home to Cummins. Nationwide manufacturing employment grew a paltry 0.3 percent last year, with some local declines that devastated the affected economies.

    In the Midwest, the big losers include Midland, Mich., which dropped 75 places to 245th, Green Bay, Wisc., which fell 83 places to 286th, and Fond du Lac, Wisc., which lost 173 places to 293rd. In Pennsylvania, Scranton-Wilkes Barre-Hazelton fell 97 places to 373rd and Williamsport dropped an astounding 212 places since last year to 383rd, with manufacturing employment off 13.2 percent since 2010 and overall employment down 3.5% last year. And then there’s Johnson, Pa., in last place at 421st.

    Like the energy economies, the industrially oriented metro areas are likely to stagnate for the time being as declines in global markets, the high dollar as well as lower demand from the energy sector take their toll. The International Monetary Fund predicts a modest 3.2 percent global growth rate for 2016, held down in significant part by a faltering Chinese economy. At the same time, OPEC overproduction and the addition of Iranian oil to global markets will likely keep the price below the $70-$80 per barrel range that energy producers need to start expanding energy investments again.

    This means, for the time being at least, the strongest smaller cities will be those which attract people and companies from bigger places by offering better amenities, cheaper housing, better schools, growing populations and, in many cases, college campuses—all offering a better quality of life but in a smaller, usually more affordable place.

    This piece first appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Michael Shires, Ph.D. is a professor at Pepperdine University School of Public Policy.

    By UtahStizzle (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

  • The Best Cities For Jobs 2016

    While speculation is mounting that they’re overheating, the tech boom is still creating jobs at a rapid pace in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, placing them atop our annual assessment of The Best Cities For Jobs for the third year in a row. A number of secondary tech centers are posting strong growth as well on the back of the boom, as well as spillover from Northern California as high prices push expanding companies and startups to locate elsewhere.

    Tech job growth has been strong, but it’s not been equally distributed across the country. For example, U.S. employment in software publishing is up 5.5% from last year to a weighted total of 343,000 jobs, 26% above the sector’s prior peak amid the dot-com bubble in 2001. The twin capitals of the U.S. tech industry have accounted for much of the growth. Employment in the information sector in the San Francisco-Redwood City-South San Francisco metropolitan statistical area expanded 6.8% last year, capping a torrid growth rate of 62% since 2010. At the same time the metro area’s professional business service sector — which employs almost four times as many as information (270,000) at such firms as Salesforce.com, Uber and Oracle — has grown an impressive 45% since 2010. Overall, the San Francisco metro area clocked 4.6% employment growth last year, and an impressive 23.8% since 2010, placing it first on our list of The Best Cities For Jobs for the second year in a row.

    In the neighboring San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Ana MSA, information sector employment has expanded 57% since 2010; its business services sector, smaller than that of San Francisco’s, has posted 36.4% job growth over the same span. Taken together, these two metro areas have been best positioned to take advantage of the growth of social networking and the smartphone economy, which have soared even as many of the older Valley firms — Intel, Hewlett Packard, Yahoo — have faced tough times. Job growth in the San Jose metro area was 4.1% last year,  and 20.8% since 2010, placing it second on our list.

    Yet the success of the Bay Area, particularly its western strip along the San Francisco Peninsula, also has had a spillover impact on other tech hubs. High housing prices, intensified by the force of California’s regulatory regime, has driven many employers to seek other, more affordable locations. A recent study by California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office found that the area’s top tech executives see high housing prices as the biggest barrier to future growth.

    If this is a headache for these tech moguls, it’s manna from heaven for upstart metro areas like Austin-Round, Texas (sixth place on our list of Best Cities For Jobs); Raleigh, N.C. (ninth); Denver-Aurora-Lakewood (seventh) and Portland, Ore. (10th). Although not inexpensive by national standards, these areas are natural catch-basins for tech workers and companies. Employment in Austin’s information sector, for example, has expanded an impressive 34% since 2010, while professional business services jobs have grown 42%. In Raleigh, the tech region with some of the lowest housing costs, information sector employment has increased 18.5% since 2010 and professional business services almost 28%.

    Methodology

    Our rankings are based on short-, medium- and long-term job creation, going back to 2004, and factor in momentum — whether growth is slowing or accelerating. We have compiled separate rankings for America’s 70 largest metropolitan statistical areas (those with nonfarm employment over 450,000), which are our focus this week, as well as medium-size metro areas (between 150,000 and 450,000 nonfarm jobs) and small ones (less than 150,000 nonfarm jobs) in order to make the comparisons more relevant to each category. (For a detailed description of our methodology, click here.)

    The Return Of The Sun Belt

    In the wake of the housing bust, many Sun Belt economies suffered, particularly in the Southeast and Intermountain West. Some believed that the half-century-long era of Sun Belt growth was nearing its end. Yet as the latest Census trends reveal, it is precisely to the Sun Belt where Americans once again are moving, taking their talents, ambitions and hopes with them.

    This resurgence is epitomized by Orlando, which jumped 14 places this year to third, capping a comeback from its dismal 2010 ranking of 36th among the largest MSAs. Job growth last year was 4.6%, equaling that of the San Francisco-Silicon Valley region.

    Orlando’s resurgence has been driven by growth in professional business service jobs (up 26.8% since 2010) , construction-related employment (up 11.5%) and by its largest sector, hospitality, up 22%. The metro area’s population has exploded from 1.2 million in 1990 to 2.3 million today. Much of this recent growth has come from domestic migration, which has accelerated two and half fold since the end of the recession. This has fueled a modest resurgence in construction employment, which expanded 4.6% in the last year in the Florida city.

    The growth of domestic migration has sparked job gains in fields such as construction, retail, education and health, as well as steady growth in business services.  This back to the Sun Belt pattern can be seen in the strong performance of No. 4 Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin, Tenn., and No. 8 Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, which are also seeing a payoff from the corporate headquarters and manufacturing jobs they have lured from higher-cost metro areas like Los Angeles. Even cities devastated by the housing bubble like Phoenix, which gained 10 places this year to 17th, and Las Vegas, which gained nine places to 22nd, are clearly on the comeback trail. The death of the Sun Belt has turned out to be more the stuff of coastal dreams than reality.

    Full List: The Best Big Cities For Jobs 2016

    As has been the case for more than a decade, Texas boasts by far the most high-growth hubs of any state. The fifth-ranked Dallas metro area remains a steady fountain of new jobs, attracting many new companies in recent years, most notably Toyota. Besides No. 6 Austin, 12th-ranked San Antonio has also been on a roll, enjoying both strong growth in population (up 11.2% over the past five years and more than 39% since 2000) as well as in jobs.

    Decline In The Tangible Economy

    But not all the news in Texas is good, with the sputtering of years-long growth in hard industries such as energy and manufacturing, which tend to provide high-paying blue collar work. The recent weakness in energy prices has been felt heavily in Houston, a star performer for much of this decade. The energy capital has descended to 24th on this year’s list from sixth last year, the largest drop of any metro area in the country. Economist Bill Gilmer, head of the Institute of Regional Forecasting at the University of Houston, expects somewhere close to 50,000 local energy jobs will disappear before things get better.

    Fortunately, unlike during the early ’80s oil bust, Houston’s economy appears to be diverse enough to weather the storm. Rapid growth in health services (the area is home to the world’s largest medical center), as well as education has kept employment expanding slightly, with 0.7% job growth over the past year, but well off the pace from its five-year increase of 16.4%. Until energy prices rise again, it’s unlikely this dynamic city will get its mojo back entirely.

    With an estimated 250,000 energy jobs gone, other energy centers have also been hard-hit. Ft. Worth-Arlington, home to energy giant Halliburton, dropped 15 places to 28th while Oklahoma City slipped four positions to 37th and New Orleans fell five to 48th. Although not as energy-dominated as Houston, oil and gas has been an important producer of high-wage jobs in these metro areas.

    Perhaps equally worrisome, there are signs that manufacturing-oriented economies are also losing momentum. Unlike Houston, these metro areas rarely have placed among the top 10 Best Large Cities For Jobs, but many had been moving up our rankings in recent years. Not anymore.

    Much of the worst damage has taken place in the Midwest. For example, Grand Rapids dropped three places to 37th, Cincinnati fell nine to 50th, Milwaukee slipped seven to 61st, and Detroit dipped two to 62nd. But the damage also extends to some of the non-Midwestern industrial centers; for example 65th-ranked Birmingham-Hoover, Ala., dropped 10 places, as did Pittsburgh, which had a strong energy sector as well. Our two bottom feeders, 69th-place Buffalo-Cheektowaga–Niagara Falls and last-place Rochester, N.Y., each dropped seven rungs.

    The Big Three

    America’s three largest metropolitan areas — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago– also rarely crack the top 10, but this year clear differences have emerged among them. By far the healthiest economy is New York City, which moved up one place to 16th. Since 2010 the Big Apple has added an impressive 530,000 jobs, paced by a 29.7% expansion in hospitality sector employment and 22% growth in professional business services jobs.

    The story is not so pleasant in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale. As its longtime Bay Area rival has boomed, Los Angeles employment growth has been mediocre, ranking it 42nd this year. Although leisure and hospitality employment has boomed, up 28.1% since 2010, and business and professional services has grown a decent, if unspectacular, 13.8% in the last five years, growth has been slow in information, barely 3.5% over the same period; employment in L.A.’s manufacturing sector declined 3.4% to 356,100 – still a substantial number but a shadow of its former might.

    Full List: The Best Big Cities For Jobs 2016

    Doing even worse is Chicago, which dropped three slots to 47th. The Windy City economy has posted modest growth in professional and business services, and its hospitality industry, while on the upswing, has added jobs at a considerably slower pace than either New York or Los Angeles. And like Los Angeles, its industrial sector continues to shrink, down 1.7% since 2010 to 281,000 jobs. In the most recent Census, the Chicago area led the nation in population decline.

    If you’ve made it this far, there’s one clear takeaway: the health of the American economy looks very different depending on where you live. Right now, growth momentum belongs to the tech centers and the Sun Belt. Don’t expect a major shift in the pecking order until the tech boom or the housing market weaken, or until manufacturing and energy pull themselves out of the current morass.

    This piece first appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Michael Shires, Ph.D. is a professor at Pepperdine University School of Public Policy.