New Geography

Author: Joel Kotkin and Michael Shires

  • The Cities Leading A U.S. Manufacturing Revival

    Manufacturing may no longer drive the U.S. economy, but industrial growth remains a powerful force in many regions of the country. Industrial employment has surged over the past five years, with the sector adding some 855,000 new jobs, a 7.5% expansion.

    Several factors are driving this trend, including rising wages in China, the energy boom and a growing need to respond more quickly to local customer demand and the changing marketplace.

    To generate our rankings of the best places for manufacturing jobs, we evaluated the 373 metropolitan statistical areas for which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has complete data over the past decade. Our rankings factor in manufacturing employment growth over the long term (2003-14), medium term (2009-14) and the last two years, as well as momentum.

    The Rust Belt Is Back

    No part of America suffered more from the de-industrialization of the past 40 years than the Great Lakes states. Yet as manufacturing  has come back, particularly the auto industry, many of the region’s economies have begun to resurge. Despite all the fashionable chatter over the question of whether we’ve reached “peak car,” the auto industry has enjoyed six straight years of increased sales, driven by low interest rates, the need to replace older cars and rising consumer confidence.

    The epicenter of this trend is exactly where the industrial decline hit hardest: Michigan, which sweeps the top three places on our list of the big cities generating the most new manufacturing jobs. The state has now recovered about 40% of the manufacturing jobs it lost during the recession. The Detroit-Dearborn-Livonia metropolitan area ranks No. 1 among the country’s 70 largest metropolitan areas for manufacturing employment growth over the time period for our study. Since 2009 the Detroit area has seen a remarkable 31.3% rebound to 89,300 industrial jobs, including a 9.8% expansion last year. This growth has helped begin to reverse a long-standing decline in employment overall—still down 12.3% since 2003—with overall employment up 5.9% since 2009.

    Detroit’s recovery is not just a matter of inertia, but reflects a unique combination of circumstances. The area is home not only to many skilled workers, but boasts the second largest concentration of engineers among the country’s 85 largest metro areas, behind only Silicon Valley.

    In second place is Warren-Troy-Farmington, in the Detroit suburbs, where manufacturing employment is up 38.8% since 2009. In third place is Grand Rapids-Wyoming, a longtime furniture-making hub where an uncommonly high share of jobs is in manufacturing, one in five; the metro area has seen industrial employment rebound 27.9% since 2009.

    Another Midwest hotspot has been Toledo, Ohio, only 60 miles from Detroit, which ranks first among the mid-sized cities we evaluated, with a 17.4% jump in industrial employment since 2009.

    Southern Cooking

    The other big cluster of industrial hotspots is in the Southeast. Manufacturing has been heading to the region for several decades, recently primed by  major investments from German and Japanese companies, among others. A prime example is Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro, Tenn., No. 4 on our list, where manufacturing employment has jumped 23.9% since 2009. Japan’s Nissan and Bridgestone have establishing manufacturing plants in Central Tennessee, which has also created opportunities for small domestic parts companies in the region. Nissan also relocated its U.S. headquarters to the area in 2006 from Southern California. And domestic auto makers are have become major players in the Southeast—Ford employs some 14,000 in the Louisville, Ky., area, which checks in at No. 7 among our largest MSAs. The South, notes a recent Brookings study, now has the highest number of workers in the country employed in “advanced industries,” which tend to be the higher paying, more technically oriented parts of the factory economy.

    Other areas that have become primary places for new industrial investment include such Deep South locations as Savannah, Ga., No. 2 on our mid-sized list, as well as No. 8 Columbia, S.C., a major center for German car companies, and No. 10 Charleston, S.C., which has benefited from the expansion of Boeing and aerospace suppliers there. These areas missed much of the  industrial revolution a century ago but are playing an impressive game of catch-up. Each has seen their industrial workforces grow over 20% since 2009. Other southern stars include Cape Coral-Ft Meyers, Fla., No. 4 on our mid-sized city list. Our small cities list also turns up Southern outperformers:  No. 2 Naples-Immokalee-Marco Island and No. 3 Sebastian-Vero-Beach, Fla.

    The Energy Belt

    Falling oil prices may be causing the oil and gas industry to rein in exploration and drilling budgets, but it provides an enormous boon for downstream industries such as refining and petrochemicals. This could keep industrial job growth going in two of our top MSAs that are in the oil patch.  Oklahoma City, where manufacturing job growth has soared 23.1% since 2009, ranks sixth, and  Houston, where the industrial workforce has expanded 19.8% over the same time  span, ranks ninth. Houston now is home to 257,300 manufacturing jobs, the third largest concentration in the country.

    As in Detroit, Houston’s industrial rise is powered by more than by brawn. The area ranks sixth among the nation’s major metros in number of engineers per capita. If the Bay Area is master of the digital economy, Houston ranks as the technological leader of the material one; it is the capital for the energy-driven revival of U.S. industry.

    Smaller energy-rich areas that have also experienced rapid industrial growth. These include two Louisiana metro areas, No. 3 Baton Rouge and No. 7 Lafayette, third and seventh, respectively on our mid-sized metro area list, as well as Midland, Texas, fifth on our small areas list. Perhaps most surprising, given its location in anti-carbon California, has been the steady growth in Bakersfield,  which stands fifth on the mid-sized list and is home to some of the nation’s largest oil fields. With 20.3% industrial growth since 2009, the area, sometimes known as “little Texas,” is the only metro area in the Golden State to make it to the top 10 in either the large or mid-sized list.

    A Shift To Smaller Cities

    Once American industry was identified predominately with big cities: New York in 1950, according to economic historian Fernand Braudel, had the largest industrial economy in the world, employing a million workers, mostly at small manufacturers. In the 1970s and 1980s, the industrial zeitgeist moved increasingly to Los Angeles, which vied with Chicago as the largest center for factory jobs.

    Today this pattern is changing dramatically. Besides the move toward the south and energy hotbeds, industry has been expanding in smaller cities as well as suburban areas beyond the core cities, says University of Washington geographer Richard Morrill. This is not unique to the United States; Germany, which has perhaps the most admired industrial sector in the world, also has dispersed its industrial base, largely to smaller cities.

    The reasons for this shift vary, from strict environmental laws in Northern cities, as well as stronger unions, and cheaper land elsewhere.

    For example, although the New York state capital Albany ranks fifth on our big metro area list, driven in large part by semiconductor manufacturing, New York City stands at a weak 62nd out of 70. Since 2009, New York has lost 3.3% of its manufacturing jobs; the city’s industrial workforce now stands at a paltry 74,700, a dramatic decline from some 400,000 as recently as the early 1980s.

    Yet with its powerful array of media, business service and hospitality businesses, New York appears to be able to withstand deindustrialization more than the two largest industrial MSAs, Chicago and Los Angeles. The one-time “city of big shoulders“ and its environs has also lost industrial jobs since 2009, down to 278,000 from 286,500 in 2011, and a far cry from the 461,600 it had in 2000.

    The decline has been, if anything, more rapid in 59th place Los Angeles. This process began with the loss of more than 90,000 aerospace jobs since the end of the Cold War. Los Angeles’ industrial job count stands at 363,900 — still the largest in the nations but down sharply from 900,000 just a decade ago.

    Does Industrial Growth Still Matter?

    Clearly deindustrialization has a bigger impact in some areas than others. Cities like San Francisco and New York appear better positioned for the post-industrial transition than Chicago or Los Angeles, where manufacturing lingered longer and the elite service or tech industries are not nearly as predominant. Yet the impact of industrial decline — or resurgence — may be more important in the future than many suppose.

    This is particularly critical for blue-collar workers, for whom industrial jobs tend to pay more. Welders and other skilled workers are increasingly in short supply, particularly as baby boomers begin to leave the workforce. Many of the cities which did well in our rankings are among the best in building new training partnerships with their industrial employers—these are skills that are decreasingly taught in the modern secondary and college curricula. In some places, vocational skills have recently been commanding higher post-graduation salaries than traditional college degrees.

    Industrial growth also provides an opportunity for emerging cities, particularly in the South and the energy belt, to add to their employment base and, in some cases, their connections with international markets. Over-dependence on manufacturing, as the Rust Belt experience showed, can be dangerous, and the need to diversify employmentremains critical. Threats to future growth include the strong dollar, the decline in the energy sector and economic weakness abroad reducing exports.

    But factory jobs remain an important asset for many regions. They may not be the central force they once were, but these jobs seem likely to continue making a big difference in the fates of many economies, both big and small.

    This piece originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of 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.

    Auto manufacturing photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

  • The Cities Creating The Most White-Collar Jobs

    In our modern economy, the biggest wellspring of new jobs isn’t the information sector, as hype might lead some to think, but the somewhat nebulous category of business services. Over the past decade, business services has emerged as easily the largest high-wage sector in the United States, employing 19.1 million people. These are the white-collar jobs that most people believe offer a ladder into the middle class. Dominated by administrative services and management jobs, the sector also includes critical skilled workers in legal services, design services, scientific research , and even a piece of the tech sector with computer systems and design. Since 2004, while the number of manufacturing and information jobs in the U.S. has fallen, the business services sector has grown 21%, adding 3.4 million positions.

    Given these facts, mapping the geography of business services employment growth is crucial to getting a grip on the emerging shape of regional economies. And because business services cover such a wide spectrum of activities, there is no one kind of area that does best. Business services thrive in a host of often different environments, far more so than the more narrow patterns we see in manufacturing or information. 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 2003, 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-Service Hubs
    Increasingly much of what we call tech is really about business services. Companies that primarily use technology to sell a product generally require many ancillary services, from accounting and public relations to market research. Apple, Google, and Facebook clearly demand many services, and that’s one reason why San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara ranks first on our big metro areas list (those with at least 450,000 jobs). Since 2009, business service employment has expanded 34.7% in the area; just last year the sector expanded 7.9%. The Bay Area’s other tech rich region, San Francisco-Redwood City-South San Francisco, ranks second.

    This linkage of tech with business services can be seen in other information-oriented parts of the country. Both third-ranked Raleigh, N.C., and No. 5 Austin, Texas, are also tech hubs, and boast rapidly expanding business service sectors. They are also much less expensive places to do business, which may suggest these areas will be well positioned to capture more service jobs if bubble-licious stock and real estate prices undermine some of the economic logic that has driven business in the Bay Area.

    The key here may also be cultural. Workers in business services tend to be well educated, and younger employees may well share the lifestyle preferences that have led workers to the Bay Area, as well as such moderately hip places as Austin. Their higher wages help defray the spiraling costs of living in these desired locations and millennials’ and, at least until their 30s, keep them closer to the urban core.

    Sun Belt Service Boom Towns
    The balance of our top 10 business service locations are all in the Sun Belt. For the most part, these are lower cost places that have enough amenities and transportation links to attract and nurture business service firms. The strongest example is Nashville, ranked fourth on our list, where business service employment has soared 41.4% over the past five years. Much of this growth is tied to health services, entertainment and staffing services.

    The re-emergence of No. 10 Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell is particularly marked, as we saw in our overall rankings. Business service growth has led economist Marci Rossell to predict a net gain of 140,000 jobs for the metro area this year, which would be the first time it has netted more than 100,000 since 1999.

    The Traditional Big Players
    Business services have long clustered in the largest American cities. But with the exception of the Bay Area, greater Dallas and Atlanta, few of our biggest metro areas did particularly well on our list. Indeed of those areas with over 2 million business service jobs, the next highest ranking belongs to No. 21 Houston, which has seen a healthy 27.8% growth in this sector since 2009.

    Other mega-regions have not done nearly as well. The largest business service economy, that of New York City, with over 4.1 million jobs in this sector, ranks 29th, with good but not spectacular 20.5% growth over the past five years. But New York, as we have seen on our overall list of The Best Cities For Jobs, consistently outpaces its major rivals. Chicago lags on our business services list in 42nd place, with 18.1% growth over the past five years, and Los Angeles, which once saw itself as a serious challenger to New York, ranks 44th, with 17.4% job growth over that span.

    Perhaps the biggest surprise has been the relatively weak record of the capital area. A major beneficiary of the stimulus, it appears now to be slipping in ways no one could have anticipated. The Washington- Arlington- Alexandria MSA, with over 2.5 million business service jobs, ranked 65th out of the 70 largest metro areas; neighboring Silver Spring-Frederick- Rockville won the dubious distinction of coming in dead last, the only large metro area to actually lose business service jobs. Washington’s “beltway bandits” have long thrived during periods of government growth. But after a boom during the early stimulus, Republican controls on spending have filtered into the business service economy. “D.C.,” noted the Washington City Paper, “went from the star of the recession to the runt of the recovery.”

    Potential Rising Stars
    Some might type-cast business service jobs as the domain of large metropolitan regions, clustered particularly in well-developed downtowns. Yet growth also is occurring in small and mid-sized cities, which often enjoy lower costs than their big city cousins. These are clearly some advantages to being in a big urban center in terms of amenities and face-to-face connections, but smaller cities are generally more attractive to middle class families, particularly to middle managers who might not be able to live decently in the hyper-expensive areas.

    One prime example is our fastest growing mid-sized region, Provo-Orem, Utah, where business service employment has surged 46.5% since 2009 to 29,600 jobs. Located south of Salt Lake City, and home to Brigham Young University, the area has long attracted manufacturers and tech firms, who provide a base for business service providers. Indeed small and mid-sized college towns have seen some of the most rapid growth. This includes our No. 1 small and overall metro area, Auburn-Opelika Ala., which has posted 66.7% growth in business services employment since 2009 (albeit off a small base – total employment in the metro area is just 60,700). Just behind is Tuscaloosa, Ala., another small town built around a big university (“Roll Tide”) and some smaller colleges. (For our overall top 10 list, click here.)

    But, as we have seen elsewhere, business service growth also tends to be strongest in areas with expanding other industries. For example, Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers, Ark., ranked fourth on our mid-sized metro area list, is also home to Walmart, a company that provides opportunities for local business service firms. Overall 11 of the top 12 areas for business service job growth are small and one, Provo-Orem, is midsized.

    These rapidly growing service regions could prove big winners in the years ahead. As telecommunication technology consistently destroys the tyranny of distance, more service firms may find it less expensive, and convenient, to locate their activities elsewhere. Just as manufacturing shifted out of the bigger cities, we could soon see a movement of business service providers as well, which would be a great boom to hundreds of small and medium-size regions.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of 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.

    Big Tiger Paw” by Josh Hallett – originally posted to Flickr as Big Tiger Paw. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

  • The Cities Winning The Battle For Information Jobs 2015

    We are supposed to be moving rapidly into the “information era,” but the future, as science fiction author William Gibson suggested, is not “evenly distributed.” For most of the U.S., the boomlet in software, Internet publishing, search and other “disruptive” cyber companies has hardly been a windfall in terms of employment. As jobs in those areas have been created, employment has shriveled in old media like newspaper, magazine and book publishing (these industries lost a net 172,000 jobs from 2009 through 2014). In the 52 largest metropolitan areas that we studied, information employment declined for roughly half from 2009 through 2014. Overall, in information industries (a sprawling sector that also includes movie and TV production, radio and another big job loser, telecom) employment has shrunken 4.2% since 2009 to 2.7 million jobs, while total nonfarm employment in the U.S. grew by 5.1%.

    Yet looking at the information sector give us an important picture of how these changes have shifted jobs to certain regions and away from others. Our rankings are based on employment growth in the sector over the short-, medium- and long-term, going back to 2003, and factor in momentum — whether growth is slowing or accelerating. (For a detailed description of our methodology, click here.)

    By far the biggest winners in the information sweepstakes are areas that developed a strong engineering base before the rise of the Internet. This has provided the platform for the rapid growth of web-based businesses, including in fields such as entertainment, media, hospitality and transportation (like Uber). It’s not surprising then that the metro areas that have posted the strongest information job growth over the past 11 years are San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara and San Francisco-Redwood City-South San Francisco.

    The growth in these hot spots has been nothing short of spectacular: information employment rose 60.2% from 2009 through 2014 in the San Jose area to 70,900 jobs, 6.9% of total employment in the metro area, while the San Francisco area has seen a 51.3% surge over the same time span to 55,800 jobs, representing 5.4% of the total workforce there.

    After the dot-com bubble burst, Silicon Valley tech employment declined consistently until 2010, since which the rebound has been dramatic. While San Francisco and areas in the northern end of Silicon Valley have not yet reached the peak employment levels seen during the bubble era, the southern end centered in San Jose and Santa Clara has easily outstripped its peaks of the early 2000s. And with information employment continuing to surge, it’s too early to say these areas have hit their “information” peak. Last year, the number of information jobs jumped 16.0% in San Jose while San Francisco experienced an 8.3% jump.

    Other traditional tech centers that have thrived in the new era include No. 9 Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, Wash., where information employment has grown a healthy 9.2% since 2009 and No. 14 Boston, where employment is up 5.1% since 2009. Compared to the Bay Area, these regions appear less at the center of the web-based media and services industries, but their overall tech economies remain very strong.

    The Rise Of Sun Belt Information Hubs

    Some of the most rapid growth in information, however, is taking place not in the older established tech hotbeds but in the lower-cost metropolitan areas of the Sun Belt. Five of our top 10 ranked metropolitan areas are located in the belt that stretches from the Atlantic coast to Arizona, led by No. 3 Austin-Round Rock, Texas, where information employment has risen 30.8% since 2009 to 25,800 positions.

    Some of this reflects a gradual movement of companies, notably from Silicon Valley, to the Texas capital. Smaller Bay Area firms such as digital advertising firm Marin Software have expanded there while Apple is expected to add 3,600 jobs there over the next few years.

    Several other Sun Belt tech hubs also are high on our list. In fourth place is Raleigh, N.C., on the strength of a 13.8% jump in information employment since 2009. It’s followed in fifth place by No. 5 Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, N.C., which boasts significant sources of venture capital, and No. 8 San Antonio-New Braunfels, Texas, which has seen the rise of locally based companies such as Execupay as well as large scale expansion of Bay Area firms such as Oracle that are flocking to the region.

    One big advantage these economies have compared to the ultra-pricey Bay Area is lower home costs, something that matters to tech workers as they enter their 30s. But the biggest challenge for some of these up and coming areas, such as Phoenix, is the dearth of large locally headquartered companies that can help create a management talent base and some tech street cred.

    The Battle Of The Bigs

    One key battleground for information supremacy is in the country’s media centers. The clear winner has been No. 7 New York, which has recorded a 13.0% jump in information jobs since 2009 to 185,200 jobs – second most in the country behind the Los Angeles metro area. That came amid an 11.8% decline over the same timespan in all publishing jobs not involving the Internet (note that we don’t have the level of detail at the local level to separate out software publishing from that figure, but it’s safe to assume the bulk of the decline was in newspapers and book and magazine publishing). The 13% jump reflects strength in new media as well as motion pictures, TV and radio, more so than technology, a field in which New York remains very much an also ran, right in the middle of the pack in terms of creating STEM and tech employment. But boosters claim this is changing, pointing out that there are now 7,000 tech firms employing 100,000 people in the area.

    Although New York is well behind the Bay Area in pace of growth, it is clearly outperforming its traditional media rivals in the rush towards digital media. Its growth dwarfs that of No. 29 Chicago, where information employment has ticked up 0.4% since 2009. The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale metro area, still home to the largest number of information workers, has managed lackluster growth of 3.5% since 2009, including a 2.0% decline last year, which puts it 28th place on our list. For all the talk about L.A.’s emergence as a new media rival to the Bay Area, the numbers suggest this is more hope than reality. Over the past five years motion picture and television employment has not been hard-hit like traditional publishing but is only experiencing slow growth. No Facebook, Google or Apple equivalent has emerged in Southern California, although some hold out hope for L.A.-based Snapchat.

    A decade or two ago there was talk about the nation’s capital challenging New York’s media dominance. But as has become evident over the past year, the Beltway’s appeal is dropping, even when it comes to producing sound-bites and punditry. The core Washington D.C.-Arlington-Alexandria metropolitan division places a mediocre 43rd, with a 3.9% decline in information employment since 2009. Other areas around the capital did poorly also, including 41st-ranked Northern Virginia and 46th-place Silver Spring-Frederick-Rockville Md. which also have lost information jobs since 2009.

    Surprises And Up And Comers

    Generally speaking manufacturing, energy and logistics-oriented economies do not do well in terms of information jobs. As of now there’s no Rust Belt version of Facebook or Google, and most factory towns do very poorly. But there’s one outstanding exception to this rule: Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, Mich., which places 10th on our list. This area, sometimes referred to “automation alley,” is Michigan’s premier tech region. It is where software meets heavy metal, with a plethora of companies focusing on factory software and new computer-controlled systems for automobiles. It is home to engineering software firms like Altair, which has been expanding rapidly, and also where General Motors recently announced plans for a $1 billion tech center, employing 2,600 salaried workers.

    If we are looking for future information hubs, one place to look would be our small and mid-sized metro area lists. Here the top ranks are dominated by college towns, including Baton Rouge, La., home to Louisiana State University, where information employment has surged 28.6% since 2009. It places third on our mid-size cities list, which also features such high-flying college towns as fourth place Provo-Orem, Utah (Brigham Young), No. 5 Durham-Chapel Hill (Duke, University of North Carolina), No. 6 Madison (University of Wisconsin), and No. 7 Ann Arbor (University of Michigan).

    The information sector may not be a big job generator, but it does play a critical role in several of our most important economies, including the San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Austin metro areas. The clear shift we are seeing towards consolidation of media with tech – a la Apple, Netflix and Google — will likely underpin a movement of these coveted jobs from traditional media centers to the Bay. But  given the unfriendly business atmosphere in California, and the super-high prices for houses, it also makes sense to look at secondary information centers, both in the Sun Belt and among college towns, which may attract even more of these jobs in the years ahead.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.  He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

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

  • Smaller Stars: The Best Small And Medium-Size Cities For Jobs 2015

    A look at job growth in America’s small and medium-size cities provides a very different, perhaps more intimate portrait of the ground-level economy across a wider swathe of the country than our survey last week of The Best Big Cities For Jobs. It takes us to many states that lack large cities, particularly in the Midwest and South. In contrast to our big city list, information technology is a driving factor in only a handful of smaller metro areas – grittier sectors like energy and manufacturing are the livelihood of a good many, as well as tourism for a surprisingly large number of thriving places that have become vacation meccas for the increasing number of affluent residents of major urban areas.

    The 421 metropolitan statistical areas we evaluated in our rankings, ranging from large to small, account for 87.6% of all U.S. nonfarm employment.  Of them, the country’s small MSAs (those with less than 150,000 nonfarm jobs) and medium-sized ones (between 150,000 and 450,000 nonfarm jobs) account for just over a third of U.S. urban employment.  Job creation in these communities since 2000 has been roughly comparable to the nation’s larger metro areas — total nonfarm employment has increased 7.5% in small and medium-size MSAs compared to 7.8% for large ones.

    Our rankings are based on employment growth over the short-, medium- and long-term, going back to 2003, and factor in momentum — whether growth is slowing or accelerating. (For a detailed description of our methodology, click here.)

    The Slipstream Economies

    A good number of our top-ranked smaller cities are posting strong job growth in the slipstream of larger economies. This is clearly the case with our top-ranked medium-size metro area, Provo-Orem, and its northern Utah neighbor, No. 7 Ogden-Clearfield. Both are located along the Wasatch Front not far from the somewhat bright lights of Salt Lake City (and more importantly its airport) and are heavily Mormon. Provo is home to Brigham Young University, the academic center of the Mormon universe with over 29,000 students. That group’s social cohesion, which translates into a high percentage of families with children, as well as emphasis on education and enterprise, underlay the success of these areas.

    But what is most striking about these two metro areas is the diversity of their economic growth. Since 2009, for example, employment in the Provo-Orem area is up 23.5%, with gains in virtually every sector, paced by increases in construction and natural resources (60%), information (30.1%), business services (46.5%) and even manufacturing (16.4%). With the exception of information jobs, Ogden has showed a similar, albeit less spectacular pattern of widespread economic growth over the same time period.

    Other slipstream economies that are thriving include our second-ranked small city. Greeley, Colo., slightly over an hour’s drive from the Denver airport. Greeley rose seven places from last year, powered largely by 114% employment growth since 2009 in construction and natural resources (oil and gas mostly) as well as solid expansions in business services (up 29.8%) and manufacturing (up 17.2%). As in the case of Provo and Ogden, Greeley benefits from being close to a dynamic large metro area, but can couple that with prized small town attributes like less traffic, good schools, relatively low housing prices and safe streets.

    Energy Hot Spots: Not All Cold Yet

    Until the recent tumble in energy prices, big oil towns reliably dominated our list. For all sorts of reasons, including fierce local opposition, big metro areas don’t tend to produce oil and natural gas, though the technical and business aspects are dominated by a few, notably Houston. The price plunge had not yet translated into heavy job losses in many energy towns by January 2015, which is as far as our data goes, although some clearly were already hurting.

    Take our top-ranked small city, Midland, and nearby No. 3-ranked Odessa, which are in the oil-rich Permian Basin of West Texas. Employment grew 9.1% in Midland last year, the fastest pace of any metro area in the country. Since 2009 the west Texas town has logged almost insane 45.8% expansion in its job base, with a large boost not only in natural resources and construction (108.4% growth), but also manufacturing (up 72.2%), wholesale trade (80.6%) , professional business services (up 40%) as well as leisure and hospitality (likely rooms for the roughnecks). Odessa boasts similar, albeit somewhat less gaudy numbers.

    But you don’t have to be in Texas to be an energy boomtown. Bakersfield, Calif., No. 6 on the medium-size list, has managed to retain a strong energy economy in a state that has all but declared war on fossil fuels. Bakersfield has been described as “little Texas,” and it has enjoyed strong, very un-Californian employment growth in such areas as manufacturing, up 17.8% since 2009, trade (19.8%) and natural resources and construction (40.8%). Blue collar employment may be suffering in much of California, but not down in this metro area, best known for country stars like Merle Haggard and highly resistant to the San Francisco-style economic post-industrial model that dominates the state.

    Yet there’s no question that there are problems in the oil patch. Some of the biggest decliners on our list from last year are big energy towns, such as Lafayette, La., which slid 43 places to 48th on the mid-size cities list, and Anchorage, Alaska, down 25 places to 63rd. On our small city list, Bismarck, N.D., a major hub for that state’s shale boom, dropped from second last year to 19th this year, and Houma-Thibodaux, La., tumbled 61 places to 81st.

    Playground Towns

    Looking across the country, however, many of the small cities doing the best are not those that produce anything tangible like energy or cars. There’s been a strong resurgence in what may be considered playgrounds for the expanding ranks of the affluent residents of major urban areas, particularly on the West Coast, where Silicon Valley is minting many millionaires along with its famous billionaires, as well as along the East Coast, where second home and retirement-oriented communities are booming. Last year, vacation home sales broke the national record.

    Among the playground areas that are prospering on our small cities are No. 4 Naples-Immokalee-Marco Island, Fla., where employment expanded 5.4% last year to 136,200 jobs, Napa, Calif. (eighth, with 15.6% job growth since 2009), and Redmond-Bend, Ore. (12th). On our mid-size list, Santa Rosa, Calif., (Sonoma County) ranks 12th and Santa Barbara- Santa Maria, Calif., 17th.

    In some of these places, not surprisingly, leisure and hospitality are the largest industry — 19.6% of the workforce in Naples is employed in this sector. Economist Bill Watkins, who has studied these trends in California and Oregon, suggests that the growth of the playground cities reflects the emergence of America’s haute bourgeoisie. “The well-to-do go to these places,” he notes, fueling both their growth and, in hard times, their sometimes sharp declines. “They have second homes and can spend a lot of money.” Watkins’ analysis of Bend, Ore.’s economy, for example, shows that upwards of 80% of the volatility in its economy can be traced to what is occurring in California, notably the Bay Area.

    Industrial Cities:Some Up, Some Down

    For generations manufacturing in the U.S. has been moving to smaller cities, largely in the South, while Midwestern and northeastern industrial cities have been taking it on the chin. With a modest growth in manufacturing, some small and mid-size cities have done surprisingly well, although many continue to lag, and even fall further in the rankings.

    Columbus, Ind., a manufacturing hub that is home to diesel engine maker Cummins, epitomizes the up and down nature of industrial economies. Right now Columbus, riding a new wave of investment from Cummins and other manufacturers, has risen to fifth on our small city list, and is at record high employment. Since 2009 the Indiana metro area’s job count has expanded 23.4% to 51,800, paced by an impressive 43.2% jump in manufacturing.

    Sadly, this is not the case for many manufacturing towns. As with the large city list, many of the bottom dwellers are old industrial centers. On the mid-size list, take  91st place Youngstown-Warren-Boardman, Ohio-Pa., where employment is down 6.6% from 2003, or No. 85 Toledo, Ohio, off 5.4% from 2003. Among small cities furniture manufacturing center Rocky Mount, N.C., fell to 255th, down 4.4% since 2009, while old steel center Weirton-Steubenville, W.V.-Ohio, dropped to 254th place, with employment down 12.7% since 2003.

    College Towns And The Future For Small Cities

    The future of small city America depends heavily on how these areas adjust to changing economic times. Given that manufacturing and agriculture are becoming less labor intensive, to stay competitive, smaller cities will need to move more aggressively into knowledge-based fields like software, medical services and higher-end business services. Mid-sized college towns like No. 1 Provo, Boulder, Colo. (14th), Lexington, Ky. (19th), and Madison, Wisc. (20th), have experienced steady growth.

    Diversification of the economy may be the best guide to future smaller city growth. Madison, for example, has a strong government and education employment base but also is home to growing number of technology firms, with information employment up an impressive 36.1% since 2009. Medical software maker Epic employs 6,800 at its sprawling campus in nearby Verona.

    But perhaps the best example of successful small city growth may be Fargo, N.D., a long time butt of sophisto jokes, which ranks sixth on our small metro area list. Fargo, which is also home to North Dakota State University, may not have the cool factor of San Francisco or even Madison, but its economy is extraordinarily balanced, and not nearly as energy-dependent as other North Dakotan cities like Bismarck or Williston. It has posted double-digit employment growth since 2009 in everything from construction and manufacturing to business services and hospitality.

    As many of America’s most prosperous metro areas become ever more expensive and highly regulated, notably in California and the Northeast, small-city America could enjoy a renaissance in coming years. But it will take determination on the part of local leaders and residents to begin expanding their economic strategy beyond any one niche, and instead develop a growth economy that can insulate themselves from the downturns that affect any single industry over time.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.  He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

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

    Photo: “Provo Downtown Historic District” by Tricia Simpson – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

  • The Best Cities For Jobs 2015

    Since the U.S. economy imploded in 2008, there’s been a steady shift in leadership in job growth among our major metropolitan areas. In the earliest years, the cities that did the best were those on the East Coast that hosted the two prime beneficiaries of Washington’s resuscitation efforts, the financial industry and the federal bureaucracy. Then the baton was passed to metro areas riding the boom in the energy sector, which, if not totally dead in its tracks, is clearly weaker.

    Right now, job creation momentum is the strongest in tech-oriented metropolises and Sun Belt cities with lower costs, particularly the still robust economies of Texas.

    Topping our annual ranking of the best big cities for jobs are the main metro areas of Silicon Valley: the San Francisco-Redwood City-South San Francisco Metropolitan Division, followed by San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, swapping their positions from last year.

    Our rankings are based on short-, medium- and long-term job creation, going back to 2003, 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.)

    An Economy Fit For Geeks

    Venture capital and private-equity firms keep pouring money into U.S. technology companies, lured by the promise of huge IPO returns. Last year was the best for new stock offerings since the peak of the dot-com bubble, with 71 biotech IPOs and 55 tech IPOs. It’s continuing to fuel strong job creation in Silicon Valley. Employment expanded 4.8% in the San Francisco Metropolitan Division in 2014, which includes the job-rich suburban expanses of San Mateo to the south, and employment is up 21.2% since 2009. This has been paced by growth in professional business services jobs in the area, up 9% last year, and in information jobs, which includes many social media functions – information employment expanded 8.3% last year and is up 28.7% since 2011.

    San Jose which, like San Francisco, was devastated in the tech crash a decade ago, has also rebounded smartly. The San Jose MSA clocked 4.9% job growth last year and 20.0% since 2009. Employment in manufacturing, once the heart of the local economy, has grown 8% since 2011, after a decade of sharp reversals, but the number of information jobs there has exploded, up 16% last year and 35.7% since 2011.

    Meanwhile, there’s been a striking reversal of fortune in the greater Washington, D.C., area, while the greater New York area has also fallen off the pace. In the years after the crash, soaring federal spending pushed Washington-Arlington-Alexandria to as high as fifth on our annual list of the best cities for jobs; this year it’s a meager 47th, with job growth of 1.5% in 2014, following meager 0.2% growth in 2013, while Northern Virginia (50th) and Silver Spring-Frederick-Rockville (64th) also lost ground, dropping, respectively, five and 15 places.

    Job growth has also slowed in the greater New York region, which also was an early star performer in the immediate aftermath of the recession, in part due to the bank bailout that consolidated financial institutions in their strongest home region. Virtually all the areas that make up greater New York have lost ground in our ranking: the New York City MSA has fallen to 17th place from seventh last year, as employment growth tailed off to 2.6% in 2014 from 3.2% in 2013. Meanwhile Nassau-Suffolk ranks 49th, Rockland-Westchester 60th and Newark is second from the bottom among the biggest metro areas in 69th place.

    The Shift To ‘Opportunity Cities’ Continues

    Not every tech hot spot has the Bay Area’s advantages, which include venture capital, the presence of the world’s top technology companies and a host of people with the know-how to start and grow companies.

    But other metro areas have something Silicon Valley lacks: affordable housing. Most of the rest of our top 15 metro areas have far lower home prices than the Bay Area, or for that matter Boston, Los Angeles or New York. And they also have experienced strong job growth, often across a wider array of industries, which provides opportunities for a broader portion of the population.

    The combination of lower prices and strong job opportunities are what earns them our label of “opportunity cities.” The Bay Area may attract many of the best and brightest, but it is too expensive for most. Despite the current boom, the area’s population growth has been quite modest — San Jose has had an average population growth rate of 1.5% over the past four years. In contrast, seven of our top 10 metro areas, including third place Dallas-Plano-Irving, Texas, and No. 4 Austin, Texas, are also in the top 10 in terms of population growth since 2000. If prices and costs are reasonable, people will go to places where work is most abundant.

    In the Dallas metro area, the job count grew 4.2% last year, paced by an 18.6% expansion in professional business services, while overall employment is up 15.7% since 2009. Job growth last year in Austin, Texas, was a healthy 3.9%, while the information sector expanded by 4.7% and since 2011 by 17.8%.

    Many Texas cities, of course, have benefited from the energy boom — the recent downturn in oil prices make it likely that growth, particularly in No. 6 Houston, will decelerate in coming years.

    But what is most remarkable about the top-performing cities is the diversity of their economies. Most have tech clusters, but several, such as Houston, Nashville, Tenn., Dallas and Charlotte, N.C., have growing manufacturing, trade, transportation and business services sectors. The immediate prognosis, however, may be brightest in places like Denver and Orlando, where growth is less tied to energy than business services, trade and tourism. Nashville, which places fifth on our list, has particularly bright prospects, due not only to its growing tech and manufacturing economy, but also its strong health care sector which, according to one recent study, contributes an overall economic benefit of nearly $30 billion annually and more than 210,000 jobs to the local economy.

    The Also-Rans

    Some economies lower in our rankings have made strong improvements, notably Atlanta-Sandy Spring-Roswell, which rose to 12th this year, a jump of 12 places. Long a star performer, the Georgia metro area stumbled through the housing bust, but it appears to have regained its footing, with strong job growth across a host of fields from manufacturing and information to health, and particularly business services, a category in which employment has increased 24% since 2009.

    In California, one big turnaround story has been the Riverside-San Bernardino area, which gained six places to rank 11th this year as it has again begun to benefit from migration caused by coastal Southern California’s impossibly high home prices.

    Several mid-American metro areas also are showing strong improvement. Louisville-Jefferson County, Ky., jumped fifteen places to 21st, propelled by strong growth in manufacturing, business services and finance. Kansas City, Kan. (23rd), and Kansas City, Mo. (46th), both made double-digit jumps in our rankings. In Michigan, Detroit-Dearborn-Livonia, bolstered by the recovery of the auto industry, gained six places to 59th, while manufacturing hub Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills picked up two to 39th. These may not be high growth areas, but these metro area no longer consistently sit at the bottom of the list.

    Losing Ground

    One of the biggest resurgent stars in past rankings, New Orleans-Metairie, dropped 17 places to 43rd, while Oklahoma City fell 17 places to 33rd. These cities lack the economic diversity to withstand a long-term loss of energy jobs if the sector goes into a prolonged downturn.

    Yet perhaps the most troubling among the also-rans are the metro areas that have remained steadily at the bottom. These are largely Rust Belt cities such as last place Camden, N.J., which has been at or near that position for years.

    Future Prospects

    Now the best prospects appear to be in tech-heavy regions, but it’s important to recognize that a key contributor to the tech sector’s frenzy of venture capital and IPOs had been the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented monetary interventions, which are now phasing out. As it is, headwinds to expansion in the Bay Area are strong. High housing prices, according to recent study, may make it very difficult for these companies to expand their local workforces. The median price of houses in tech suburbs like Los Gatos now stand at nearly $2 million — rich for all but a few — while downtown Palo Alto office rents have risen an impossible 43% in the last five years.

    Companies like Google, which has run into opposition over its proposed new headquarters expansion, may choose to shift more employment to other tech centers, such as Austin, Denver, Seattle, Raleigh and Salt Lake City, where the cost of doing business tends to be less. Similarly the stronger dollar could erode the modest progress made by some industrial cities, such as Detroit and Warren, as it gives a strong advantage to foreign competitors.

    Normally we would expect these processes to play out slowly. But in these turbulent times, it’s best to keep an eye out for disruptive changes — a new economic cataclysm, should one occur, could quickly shift the playing field once again.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.  He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

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

  • The Cities Stealing Jobs From Wall Street

    When we think about American finance, the default image is of a pinstriped banker on Wall Street. But increasingly financial services is shifting away from the traditional bastions of money.

    In an analysis of recent and longer-term employment trends, we have identified the large cities –those with over 450,000 jobs – that are gaining jobs in financial services, a sector that employs 7.9 million people nationwide.  Overwhelmingly, the fastest growth has been in cities not associated with high finance, but largely low-cost Sun Belt cities, which account for seven of the top 10 large metro areas on our list.

    View the Best Cities for Manufacturing Jobs 2014 List

    In first place: Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale, Ariz., where financial employment has expanded 12.3% since 2008 and a remarkable 7.2% last year. Close behind in second through fourth are San Antonio-New-Braunfels, Texas, Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, Texas, and Nashville-Murfreesboro-Franklin, Tenn. These metro areas have advantages beyond just warmer weather; all are places with affordable housing and no state income taxes.

    The three metro areas outside the Sun Belt in our top 10 also enjoy lower levels of taxation and housing prices. St. Louis, Mo. (fifth), Salt Lake City (seventh), and Richmond, Va. (ninth), have begun to bulk up on financial jobs, largely to the detriment of the traditional money centers New York (44th), San Francisco (48th), Boston (55th), Los Angeles (57th) and Chicago (61st). Despite the current stock market boom, and good times for large banks, financial services employment in these cities has been stagnant in recent years. Since 2008, New York has lost 3.8% of all its finance-related jobs, while Los Angeles’ financial sector has shed 7% of its jobs and Chicago 6.7%.

    Why Financial Services  Are Moving

    Current financial trends—accelerated By TARP and “too big to fail” regulations—have ledto a growing concentration of banking and financial services in the six largest money-center banks.  In the first five years of the Obama administration the share of financial assets held by the top six banks soared 37% to account for two-thirds of all bank assets.

    But as we have seen in other industries, that domination of market share don’t necessarily drive employment growth where the big banks are headquartered. Increasingly we are seeing the rise of what urban analyst Aaron Renn describes as the “executive headquarters,” where only elite employees and their support staff remain while the vast majority of jobs migrate to lower-cost places.

    Given the advances in telecommunications technology, many of the core functions of banks can be conducted anywhere. Why have a midlevel salesperson or mortgage loan processor occupy expensive Manhattan office space when they could function as effectively from much cheaper space in Phoenix, Saint Louis or Richmond?

    Pundits like to speak about “face to face” contact as critical in financial services. This may be true for putting together mergers or IPOs, or to concoct the latest derivative, but it doesn’t matter in taking care of customer questions, monitoring credit cards or administering offices in suburban strip malls.

    The People Advantage

    These smaller cities have advantages for both the financial institutions and their employees. For one thing, the cost of employees is much lower. According to salary reporting website Payscale.com, the median financial manager in New York or San Francisco costs $90,724 to $98,783, respectively; while one in Phoenix costs only $77,467.

    But this is not just good for the companies. Employees who make less in St. Louis, Phoenix or Dallas often live far better than their counterparts who earn higher salaries in the traditional money centers. One big reason is housing costs, which are a third to half cheaper in the top cities on our list than in places like Boston (2013 median home price of $375,900) New York ($465,700), or San Francisco ($679,200).  Compare that to $183,600 in top-rated Phoenix or $171,000 in San Antonio-New Braunfels.  Even in Austin, with its surging growth in technology and its role as state capital and home to a huge public university, the median home costs a relatively affordable $222,900, according to the National Association of Realtors.

    Sometimes it‘s not just lower costs. If you are servicing Spanish-language customers, for example, a location in San Antonio, Phoenix or Austin with their large Spanish-speaking workforces might prove convenient. If you are interested in trade finance, Texas, now the leading export state, might prove attractive. Firms concentrating on mortgages might also see advantages in locating in places like Nashville, Phoenix, Austin, Dallas and San Antonio, which are all expected to add many more households, according to a recent Pitney Bowes  survey, than much slower-growing locales in California or the Northeastern seaboard.

    And then there is the unique case of Salt Lake, another emerging financial powerhouse. Mormons’ linguistic skills have attracted loads of big international companies, such as Goldman Sachs, who need people capable of conversing in Lithuanian, Chinese and Tongan. Goldman has 1,400 employees in Salt Lake City, making it the investment bank’s sixth largest location worldwide.

    Future Trends

    People tend to see the growth of the biggest banks as confirming the notion that economic opportunity will continue to be concentrated in our elite, expensive cities. Yet in reality urban growth patterns seem to suggest that these cities cannot easily accommodate mid-skill or middle-management jobs. So even as decision-making remains ensconced in New York,  Boston  or Chicago, the flow of the vast majority of financial jobs should continue to head outward.

    This competition may become all the greater if, as Deloitte predicts, financial service employment begins to spike with a long-term economic recovery. Nor will the emerging financial states be satisfied long-term with the bottom end of the financial employment pool. Palm Beach, Fla., for example, has set up an office to lure hedge funds out of the New York area, touting warm weather and much lower taxes.

    Increasingly, some New York financial institutions are starting movemore critical roles to lower-cost areas, like investment advisory and technology jobs. Places like St. Louis, where the industry has grownand approaches critical mass, seem to be in position to make a serious bid for higher-end  jobs.

    Although no one expects Phoenix or Salt Lake City to overtake Manhattan as the financial center of the world, over time we can expect these cities to develop into important banking centers. Just as the move of automakers to the Southeast and tech companies to Austin, Salt Lake City and Raleigh remade the economic map of those industries, the shift of financial services to the new centers might eventually do the same in that sector as well.

    View the Best Cities for Manufacturing Jobs 2014 List

    This story originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

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

    Photo: robotography

  • America’s New Industrial Boomtowns

    David Peebles works in a glass tower across from Houston’s Galleria mall, a cathedral of consumption, but his attention is focused on the city’s highly industrialized ship channel 30 miles away. “Houston is the Chicago of this era,” says Peebles, who runs the Texas office of Odebrecht, a $45 billion engineering firm based in Brazil. “In the sixties you had to go to Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit. Now Houston is the place for new industry.”

    With upward of $35 billion of new refineries, chemical plants and factories planned through 2015 for Houston and the surrounding Gulf Coast, companies like Odebrecht, which runs chemical plants and is working on a new freeway in the area, have converged on the nation’s oil and gas capital. They are part of the reason why the Texas metropolis ranks first on our list of the best large cities for manufacturing.

    Houston, with 255,000 manufacturing jobs, is not yet the country’s largest industrial center; it still lags behind the longtime leaders Los Angeles, with 360,000 manufacturing jobs, and Chicago, home to 314,000. But it is clearly on a stronger trajectory. Since 2008, Houston’s manufacturing workforce has expanded 5% while Los Angeles has lost 13% of its industrial jobs and Chicago’s factory workforce has shrunk 11%.

    View the Best Cities for Manufacturing Jobs 2014 List

    Why Manufacturing Matters

    Whether America is on the path to a sustainable industrial expansion or is just seeing a weak bounce back has been widely debated, but the recent numbers are impressive. Since 2010 the U.S. has added 647,000 manufacturing jobs. New energy finds have led to the construction and expansion of pipelines and refineries, and has sparked foreign industrial investment reflecting electricity costs that are now well below those in Europe or East Asia. Besides Houston, also ranking high on our big cities list are two other energy towns, No. 5 Oklahoma City and No. 10 Ft. Worth, Texas. Our mid-sized cities list is led by Lafayette, La., with nearby Baton Rouge in 11th place.

    Evangelists of the “information economy” may think that industrial jobs are passé, as epitomized by a recent Slate article that recommended that working-class people from places like Detroit should move to areas like Silicon Valley or Boston where they can make money cutting the hair and walking the dogs of high-tech magnates. But the notion that U.S. manufacturing is doomed, and that the jobs are of lower quality than those in high-tech centers, is largely bogus; even in Silicon Valley the majority of new projected jobs are expected to pay under $50,000 annually. In contrast manufacturers pay above-average wages, in some cases due to unionization, but in many others because of the increasing sophisticated skills required by today’s factories.

    Although we will likely never see a boom in factory employment on the scale experienced in the last century, the demand for blue-collar skills is projected to increase in future years. Among all professions for non-college graduates, manufacturing skills are most in demand, according to a study by Express Employment Professionals. By 2020, according to BCG and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the nation could face a shortfall of around 875,000 machinists, welders, industrial-machinery operators, and other highly skilled manufacturing professionals.

    Southern Comfort

    Our research suggests that much of this growth will be in metro areas in the South and the Great Plains that are known for friendly business climates. New industrial investment is tending to go to places that are largely non-union, and feature lower taxes and light regulation. Epitomizing this trend is the No. 2 city on our large metro area list, Nashville-Murfreesboro-Franklin, Tenn., where manufacturing employment is up 6% since 2008. Nashville has become a hotbed for foreign investment in manufacturing, with the expansion of the Nissan facilities in nearby Smyrna, as well as a host of suppliers.

    This is occurring, in part, because some large companies are shifting production to America from China in response to rising Chinese wages as well as sometimes unpredictable business conditions there.

    Investment inflows, both from overseas and domestic companies, have boosted other standout southern industrial hubs, as well as the smaller metro areas on our mid-sized city list, notably Mobile, Ala. (third place), with its expanding industrially oriented port, and No. 14 Charleston-North Charleston-Summerville, S.C., which has been a beneficiary of major new foreign investment as well as the expanded presence of U.S. aerospace giant Boeing. The South also is home to our No. 1 small manufacturing city, Florence-Muscle Shoals, Ala.

    The Resurgence of the Rust Belt

    The progress is not confined to the Sun Belt. The resurgence of the U.S. auto industry has revived the economy of Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, Mich., also known as “automation alley.” The home to many parts suppliers, engineering and tech support for the car industry, this area has enjoyed an impressive 12.7 percent growth in manufacturing jobs since 2008, placing it third on our big cities list.

    Detroit, the center of the auto industry, ranks a respectable 16th on our big city list, but the big improvements in the Rust Belt are occurring in mid-sized cities such as Lansing-East Lansing, Mich. (eighth), Grand Rapids (ninth) and Ft. Wayne, Ind. (10th).

    But arguably the strongest Rust Belt recovery has occurred in Elkhart-Goshen, Ind., third on our small cities list. Since 2008 Elkhart’s industrial employment — much of it in the recreational vehicle industry — has expanded 30%, one of the most dramatic employment turnarounds of any place in America. Unemployment has fallen to 5% from a recession high of 20.2%.

    Western Exposure

    The South and the Great Lakes may be America’s industrial heartland, but there are several strong pockets in the West. One region that is doing particularly well is the Pacific Northwest, led by Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, which has experienced 11% manufacturing employment growth since 2010.

    Boeing is key here, but the Pacific Northwest’s industrial expansion has also been fueled by low electricity rates, largely due to the area’s strength in hydroelectricity. Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro OR-WA (11th) is usually associated more with hipsters, but manufacturing growth has taken off, particularly with the expansion of Intel’s large semiconductor facility in suburban Hillsboro.

    Another Western industrial hotspot is Utah, a state with low energy costs and business friendly regulation. Salt Lake City, 12th on our large metro area list, has enjoyed a 5.7% increase in industrial jobs since 2010. Growth has been even stronger in two other Utah cities, Provo -Orem and Ogden-Clearfield, which rank fifth and seventh, respectively, on our mid-sized cities list.

    One surprising place where manufacturing is making a mild comeback is in the Bay Area, which for years has exported high-tech manufacturing jobs to places like Utah as well as the rest of the world. Despite ultra-expensive electricity, high labor costs and some of the world’s most demanding environmental laws, San Jose (13th on our big metros list) San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood (15th) have posted solid industrial growth after years of decline. Yet both remain below their 2008 levels, and may find new growth difficult once the current tech bubble collapses.

    Laggards

    Two of the worst performers on this list are the big metro areas that have for decades been the country’s largest industrial hubs, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale (55th) and Chicago-Joliet-Naperville (56th). It appears they lack the cost competitiveness and specialized focus of America’s ascendant industrial regions.

    Another clear loser is the Northeast, which accounts for seven of the eight lowest ranked big metro areas. Since 2008, Philadelphia (62nd) has lost 21% of its once-large industrial job base, while New York City, which has been losing industrial jobs for decades, ranks 45th. Here, too, high costs and regulation are a factor, as well as the loss of industrial know-how resulting from long-term erosion of their manufacturing bases.

    Of course, some information age enthusiasts may argue that losing such jobs is something of a badge of honor, since “smart” regions do not focus on the gritty business of making things. Yet if you look across the country, you can see that many of the strongest local economies, from Houston and Nashville to Seattle, have taken part in the U.S. industrial resurgence. It seems this is one party more worth joining than avoiding.

    View the Best Cities for Manufacturing Jobs 2014 List

    This article first appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Houston skyline photo by Bigstock.

  • The Cities Winning The Battle For Information Jobs 2014

    In the town of Verona on the rural fringes of Madison, Wisc., there’s a Google-like campus that houses one of the country’s most rapidly growing tech companies, and one of the least well known. Founded in 1979, the medical software maker Epic has grown to employ 6,800 people, most of whom work at its 5.5 million-square-foot headquarters complex, which sprawls over 800 acres of what was farmland until the early 1990s.

    Despite annual revenue estimated at $1.5 billion, the company is congenitally publicity shy, a characteristic associated with its founder and CEO, Judy Faulkner. Yet in its quiet, unassuming way, Epic is emblematic of the expansion of the information industry in the Madison area. Employment in the metropolitan area’s information sector is up 28% since 2008, among the fastest growth in the country over that period. This has occurred despite the city’s reputation for left-wing, often anti-business politics—a culture that its left-leaning mayor (and Epic booster), Paul Soglin, describes as “76 square miles surrounded by reality.”

    To come up with our list of the cities with the fastest-growing information sectors, we zeroed in on the 55 metropolitan statistical areas that have at least 10,000 information jobs, which includes software, publishing, broadcasting and telecommunications services. We used the same methodology as for our overall ranking of the Best Cities for Jobs: we ranked the MSAs based on job growth in the sector over the long-term (2002-13), mid-term (2008-13) and the last two years, as well as recent momentum.

    View the Best Cities for Information Jobs 2014 List

    Our top 10 is dominated by large metro areas renowned as tech hubs – Madison, at No. 5,  is the smallest by far. In first place is Silicon Valley — San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara — followed by San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, which together employ over 110,000 information workers. Both have been primary winners in the latest high-tech bubble. Since 2008 information employment is up 23% in San Jose and 27% in San Francisco.

    They’re followed by Boston-Cambridge-Quincy in third place, and Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, Texas in fourth. The foundation built in previous tech booms — including venture capital, educational institutions, corporate headquarters, and skilled workers — has helped many of the strongest tech regions become even more so this go around.

    But there are some surprising places on our list, including a few Sun Belt metro areas that were hard hit in the housing bust. Take Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, Ga., which ranks sixth on our list, with a 7.7% expansion in information employment since 2010. Less expensive than the West Coast hotbeds or Boston, Atlanta could be emerging as a player in the sector. Last year General Motors opened a software facility in suburban Roswell, with plans to create over 1,000 new jobs.

    Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale, Ariz., ranks ninth with 11% growth in information employment since 2008. In 2013, the metro area added as many information jobs, roughly 2,000, as the Bay Area, according to an Arizona State University study.

    The Big Players

    Historically, information jobs have clustered in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. Los Angeles still leads the nation with 201,000 information jobs, while New York is No. 2 with 182,000.

    Yet the fortunes of the biggest players appear to be changing. New York ranks a respectable 13th on our list of the fastest-growing cities for information jobs, with a 7.7% expansion since 2008. This reflects not only the growth of the city’s relatively small tech sector but also its robust film, television and media industries. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, however, has not fared nearly so well, ranking a middling 27th, on our list. This reflects, in part, the erosion of the region’s once dominant entertainment industry. This is particularly true of feature films, where production has dropped 50% from 1996 levels. Since 2000, L.A. has lost 9,000 entertainment industry jobs, leaving it with 132,000.

    With tech companies such as Apple and Google targeting content, and the massive shift of readers over to the web, the preeminence of New York and Los Angeles could continue to erode over time.

    This shift can be seen in the growing forays of the Valley into film and television production through companies such as Netflix and Google’s YouTube, as well as in the already longstanding decline of the music industry — undermined by both legal and illegal forms of music distribution online.

    Information Jobs Set To Disperse

    For New York, a more worrisome development is the massive decline of newspaper, magazine and book industry employment. At a time when Google alone reaps more advertising revenues than the entire newspaper business, it’s not surprising that media growth is shifting toward the Left Coast. Since 2001, the book publishing industry, dominated by New York, has contracted nationally by 17,000 jobs. Newspapers lost 190,000 positions and magazines 50,000 in that same span. But internet publishing, dominated by the Bay Area, expanded by 77,000 jobs during the same window.

    In many ways, the recent tech boom, with its emphasis on social media, has been a blessing to high-cost areas such as Silicon Valley, San Francisco and even New York. Yet at the same time, as we have seen in our other jobs lists, the information sector is expanding most rapidly in some fairly unexpected places. Some of the fastest growers on a percentage basis are still minor players– Janesville, Wisc., Lansing, Mich., and Flint Mich. –  and are tied largely to the up and downs of the manufacturing sector.

    But some, like Madison, are heading toward critical mass. Provo-Orem, Utah, for example, with some 9,800 information jobs, did not make the 10,000 job cut for our list, but should soon given its 21% growth since 2008. Others are in regions just outside the main information hubs, including Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Goleta, north of Los Angeles, and San Luis Obispo, south of San Jose, as well as Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, north of New York, and Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C., just outside Raleigh-Cary. There has also been rapid information job growth in Huntsville, Ala., a tech center that built up around NASA, and Baton Rouge, La., which has benefited from growth in energy and manufacturing along the lower Mississippi.

    Ultimately, price pressures, particularly on housing, are likely to feed growth in some of these emerging regions. In this way, what is happening in Madison foreshadows the growth of a whole series of new information hotbeds. These may not challenge Silicon Valley, New York or Hollywood in the near future, but they are likely to make their presence known as information jobs continue to spread to fast-growing and more affordable regions.

    View the Best Cities for Information Jobs 2014 List

    This story originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

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

    Madison, Wisconsin photo by Patrick43470.

  • The Best Small And Midsize Cities For Jobs 2014

    In the classic television show “The Honeymooners,” many jokes were wrung out of bus driver Ralph Cramden’s membership in the International Brotherhood of Loyal Raccoons, headquartered in Bismarck, North Dakota. When Ralph mentioned in one episode to his wife, Alice, that among the privileges is that they could be buried at the “Raccoon National Cemetery” in Bismarck, Alice’s reply was that it made her not know “if I want to live or die.”

    That’s worth a chuckle, but perhaps it’s time to reconsider Bismarck, which ranked first out of the 398 metro areas we considered for our annual roundup of The Best Cities For Jobs. A metro area of 120,000 located in the country’s fastest-growing state and near the vast Bakken oil fields, the number of jobs in Bismarck is up 3% over the last year and a sizzling 32.4% since 2002. You might not want to be buried there, but at least you can get a job before that.

    Bismarck’s growth, although remarkable, is mirrored in many smaller places. When we look at economic growth in America, we tend to focus on large metropolitan areas (we draw the bar at 5 million people and up). However over 40% of Americans live outside these big cities and their much more populous suburbs, notes demographer Wendell Cox. They reside in smaller cities and towns, the destination of choice for many of the domestic migrants fleeing the largest metropolitan areas for the better part of the last decade.

    View the Best Cities for Jobs 2014 List

    These places are often seen by pundits as economic backwaters, but in fact small and mid-sized metro areas take up 16 of the top 20 spots of our overall list of The Best Cities For Jobs. For the most part, it is the smaller markets with under 150,000 jobs that are growing the fastest, but several mid-sized cities (between 150,000 and 450,000 nonfarm jobs) also are outperforming, including Boulder, Colo., which ranks first on our medium-sized cities list, and Provo-Orem, Utah, which ranks second. These areas are as varied as America. Some fit the resource-dominated archetype often associated with smaller cities and towns but others are driven by industry and even tech growth.

    The Energy Hubs

    As we saw with our large cities list, metro areas that are connected to the energy economy have been peak performers. Beyond Bismarck, our list of the Best Small Cities For Jobs includes Greeley (fifth) and Ft. Collins (17th), both located near the oilfields of northern Colorado; and near the west Texas oilfields, the cities of Midland (sixth), San Angelo (11th), Odessa (15th) and Lubbock (16th).

    Energy jobs pay an average of about $80,000 a year according to BLS data. But this wealth is not only for geologists or those with oil stains on the hands. The money brought into these communities has also sparked strong growth in such fields as manufacturing, construction and business services in virtually all these towns. In Midland, for example, natural resources and construction employment has surged 50% since 2008, but wholesale trade, manufacturing, business and financial services have also expanded strongly.

    Manufacturing Comeback Cities

    Plenty of old industrial cities are at the bottom of the 240 MSAs we ranked for our small cities list, including 238th place Danville, Ill., which has lost 6% of its jobs since 2008, and second from last, Michigan City-La Porte, Ind., where employment has dropped 6.8% over the same span. But some of the highest fliers are also industrial towns. This includes second-ranked Elkhart-Goshen, Ind., which rose a remarkable 63 places from last year on our list, and from 233rd back in 2010. The recreational vehicle manufacturing hub suffered steep job losses during the Recession, but industrial employment has risen 24% since 2010.

    Like energy, industrial jobs tend to pay more than most, and have a strong effect on other sectors. Since 2010 in the Elkhart-Goshen area, employment in wholesale trade and business services has expanded at double-digit percentage paces, while retail employment has shot up a healthy 7.4%. In Grand Rapids-Wyoming, Mich., which ranks third on our list of the Best Midsize Cities For Jobs, manufacturing employment is up almost 14.7% since 2010 while job growth has also been strong in medical services, education, and business services. Grand Rapids has 4.9% more jobs now than in 2002, a far sight better than larger industrial metro areas like Detroit, where employment has declined 16.2% over the same period.

    But most of the comeback industrial towns are not in the Midwest but the Southeast, which has gotten the bulk of new investment from foreign automakers and steelmakers. This includes Auburn-Opelika, Ala., No. 7 on our small cities list, where there has been a surge in employment by auto parts suppliers. The home of 25,000-studentAuburn University, it has also seen strong growth in business services and hospitality. Two South Carolina metro areas, Anderson (12th) and Spartanburg (13th), have also benefited from the industrial resurgence in the region.

    College Towns

    We may be approaching the end of a “higher education bubble,” as Glenn Reynolds and others have suggested, but at least for now many college towns in the Midwest, the southeast and the Intermountain West continue to show strong job growth.

    In Columbia, Mo., home to the 35,000-student University of Missouri, employment has expanded 9.7% since 2008 and 4% in 2013, placing it third on our small cities list. In ninth-place College Station, Texas, the presence of Texas A&M (56,000 students) has sparked growth in the information and business services sectors, in which employment has expanded 18.2% and 14.2%, respectively, since 2008, while leisure and hospitality employment is up 29.5% over the same period. Higher education has continued to be a strong and growing industry for these small towns, although its long-term sustainability may be hampered by a lethargic economy and burgeoning student debt.

    Places For The Rich And Famous

    In this most unequal of recoveries, some of the biggest winners are cities that cater to the rich and aging baby boomers. People over 55 control upward of three-quarters of the country’s wealth and more than half all discretionary dollars. And unlike the millennials and Xers who follow them, this generation has generally profited more from the recent jump in equity and property prices.

    Fourth on our small cities list is St. George in scenic southwestern Utah, a fast-growing community for retirees, where employment shot up 5.38% in 2013. Naples-Marco Island, Fla. (eighth), long a major lure to northern snowbirds, is home to a fast-growing economy built around hospitality and construction. Napa, Calif. (18th), has emerged as a major beneficiary of spending by wealthy retirees from the booming San Francisco Bay Area.

    The Future For Smaller Cities

    Big city mayors are wont to proclaim that they’re on the cutting edge of economic life. Big cities are where “the action is,” Atlanta’s Karim Reed said at a recent confab in Chicago. But as our roundup of the cities with the strongest employment growth shows, many of the hottest economies in the country are in places that most urbanistas would write off as the boondocks. Some of them, may only do well as long the energy and agriculture booms continue, but many other will benefit as boomers continue to seek out comfortable, less congested, and often less expensive, places to retire. These smaller places may also benefit as millennials start seeking to buy homes and raise families. And with the expansion of communication technology, they may find it increasingly easy to perform sophisticated work from smaller places. America’s economy may still remain dominated by its giant metro areas, but it would be inaccurate to discount the role of smaller places in the evolving American economy.

    View the Best Cities for Jobs 2014 List

    This story originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

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

    Boulder, CO photo by Phil Armitage.

  • The Best Cities For Jobs 2014

    As the recovery from the Great Recession stretches into its fifth year, the locus of economic momentum has shifted. In the early years of the recession, the cities that created the most jobs — sometimes the only ones — were either government- or military-dominated (Washington, D.C.;  Kileen-Temple-Fort Hood, Texas), or were powered by the energy boom in Texas, Oklahoma and the northern Great Plains.

    Now the recovery has shifted to a new group of cities that have benefited from the boom on Wall Street and the parallel IPO surge in Silicon Valley — call them asset inflation cities. Last year the S&P 500 clocked its biggest rise since 1997, helped by aggressive monetary easing by the Federal Reserve and a return to the stock market by investors who had retreated to the sidelines after the financial crisis. The high times have brought on a surge in IPOs: 2013 was the busiest year for public offerings in over a decade, and the pace has if anything quickened this year, with healthcare and technology offerings leading the way. M&A has also surged, with some very impressive valuations in the tech sector, such as Facebook’s $19 billion purchase of 50-person What’s App. The biggest beneficiaries employment-wise: the Bay Area, Silicon Valley and New York City.

    View the Best Cities for Jobs 2014 List

    Our rankings are based on short-, medium- and long-term job creation, going back to 2002, and factor in momentum — whether growth is slowing or accelerating. So the top of our list includes both cities that have had the most striking comebacks since the Great Recession as well as those that have consistently created jobs over the long haul. We have compiled separate rankings for large cities (nonfarm employment over 450,000), which are our focus this week, as well as medium-size cities (between 150,000 and 450,000 nonfarm jobs) and small cities (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.) Small cities, as a rule, show more volatility than their larger counterparts since the decision of one major business to expand or contract can have an enormous effect on a relatively tiny employment base. (Check back next week for our ranking of mid-size and small cities).

    Big Money, Big Gains

    Yet even among the largest metropolitan areas, shifts in the economy can have a dramatic impact. This is clearly the case with the two metro areas that top our list this year, first-place San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, Calif. (aka Silicon Valley), where the number of jobs surged 4.3% last year, and San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, where employment expanded 3.6%. Before the current tech boom, largely centered on social media companies, these metro areas were lagging badly. In 2010, San Jose ranked 47th on this list out of the 66 metro areas with more than 450,000 nonfarm jobs and San Francisco was 42nd.

    The information sector has driven this remarkable change in fortunes. Since 2008, the number of information jobs in the San Jose area has risen 37% to 60,800, while in San Francisco, employment in that category has grown 28% to 52,300 jobs. This has been accompanied by strong increases in such high-wage fields as professional and business services, where Silicon Valley has clocked 10% growth, and San Francisco twice that, adding 42,500 jobs, since 2008.

    The housing bubble helped to launch New York City from its doldrums a decade ago (it rose from 54th on our list of the Best Cities For Jobs in 2005 to 22th in 2008). In recent years, New York has been well served by Washington’s bailout of the financial sector, which accounts for roughly 15% of the metro area GDP — the Big Apple climbed to 10th place in our ranking in 2010 and to seventh this year. This is in good part a result of asset inflation; the number of finance jobs in New York has actually declined in recent years, but with a lot of extra spending money in the pockets of the city’s relatively high concentration of wealthy people, some jobs are being created. Most of the growth has been in hospitality, health and education and retail, fields that do not generally offer top salaries. New York City has also seen steady growth in information jobs — although at only a third the rate of Silicon Valley — as well as professional and business services.

    Bring On The Usual Suspects

    Many of the other metro areas at the top of our 2014 list have been adding jobs consistently over the past decade. Some are also beneficiaries of the high-tech boom, though mostly as a result of big West Coast companies deciding to site new offices in these attractive locations. In third place is perennial high-flyer Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, Texas, where the number of jobs grew 4.1% last year, and 13.7% since 2008. Raleigh-Cary N.C. places fourth (3.9%/7.2% over the same time spans). These metro areas routinely attract people and companies from California and the Northeast with lower taxes and real estate costs that, on an income basis, are as much as half those in the asset-rich areas.

    Unlike the asset-based economies, which ebb and flow with the markets, these and the other usual suspects have a record of consistent growth not only in jobs but also population. This reflects the more blue-collar economic foundation of many of these cities, based on energy, manufacturing and logistics — sectors that tend to create higher-paid blue- and white-collar jobs. Growth has continued in these areas throughout all the changes in the economy, which has encouraged long-term migration and investment.

    Viewed over the last five years, for example, fifth-place Houston has expanded its total employment by 218,000 jobs, growing at the same rate as both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas—an impressive feat given that it is almost 20 percent larger than the two Silicon Valley cities combined. But an arguably bigger difference can be seen in demographics. The Houston metro area’s population has grown over 50% faster since 2010 than the Bay Area regions, and roughly twice as fast as New York. Houston is on track this year to build more new housing units than the entire state of California. This combination of rapid population and job growth – the former itself a major source of jobs in construction and services — can be seen in places such as No. 6 Nashville-Franklin-Murfreesboro, Tenn.; No. 10 Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, Colo.; and No. 14 Charlotte-Gastonia-Round Hill, N.C.

    The Sun Belt Bounces Back

    Perhaps the biggest surprise on this year’s list is the resurgence of the Sun Belt metro areas that were hardest hit by the housing bust. Ever since, the Northeast-centric pundit class has been giddily predicting these cities’ demise. Strangled by high energy prices, cooked by record droughts, rejected by a new generation of urban-centric millennials, the Atlantic proclaimed this vast southern region to be where the American dream has gone to die.

    But the data show that many of these metro areas are in the midst of a powerful comeback. Take Orlando-Kissimmee, Fla., ranked eighth this year, up 23 places from last year. Similarly Phoenix has risen 17 places from last year to 22nd and is way up from its 51st place ranking in 2010.

    Perhaps even more surprising  is the resurgence of 17th-place Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif., which ranked near the bottom of the big city table at 63rd in 2010. Now foreclosures have dropped and job growth has picked up. In fact, the Inland Empire is now doing considerably better in job creation than Southern California’s older urban regions, including Los Angeles-Long Beach (37th), Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine (34th) and San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos (32nd).

    Bringing Up The Rear

    Many large cities continue to lag. Philadelphia, despite being close to New York and its considerable urban amenities, ranks 51st, with paltry 0.9% job growth since 2008. Not much better off, despite its connections to the Obama White House, is Chicago, which places 47th. Not only is the Windy City not adding many jobs (0.5% growth since 2008) but every county in the area, according to recent Census numbers, is losing migrants to other parts of the country.

    But Chicago is certainly doing better than the host of old industrial cities that continue to dominate the nether reaches of our survey. These include last-place Camden, N.J.; second to last Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, Mich.; Cleveland-Elyria- Mentor, Ohio (62nd), Kansas City, Mo. (61st), Newark-Union, N.J. (60th), and St. Louis (59th). All these cities, apart from Kansas City, have occupied the bottom of our list for nearly a decade now, and seem unlikely to move up in the immediate future.

    View the Best Cities for Jobs 2014 List

    What’s Next

    It seems clear that as long as the tech and financial sectors retain their momentum, New York and the Bay Area should continue to fare well. But if asset growth slows, these areas could slip quickly.

    The Texas cities and the other usual suspects are probably a better bet to continue to generate new jobs, but they too face challenges. If the economy slows down energy prices will follow, hampering growth in energy meccas like Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. A surge in interest rates could undermine the comeback of the Sun Belt cities, which remain highly dependent on housing and construction-related economic activity.

    But overall, for reasons ranging from housing costs to business climate, we expect the usual suspects to remain high on our list of the best cities for jobs for years to come, in part due to their growing populations. What remains unknown is how the evolving industrial structure of the economy will affect the slower-growing cities along the coasts whose fortunes have tended to ebb and flow in recent years.

    This story originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

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

    Photo: Market Street, San Francisco by Wendell Cox.