We have time for one last comparison of the Super Bowl cities, both of which are widely conceded to be good places to live and work. But how have they performed economically through the Great Recession and into 2014?
Both have performed well, but Denver has performed better.
The urban analyst Joel Kotkin at newgeography.com teamed up recently with Praxis Strategy Group to identify metro areas “with the most momentum going into 2014.” They examined a trove of data from 2007 through 2012 or 2013 (depending on available statistics) for the 52 largest U.S. metro areas.
“To gauge economic vitality,” Kotkin said, “we used four metrics: GDP growth, job growth, real median household income growth and current unemployment. To measure demographic strength, we looked at population growth, birth rate, domestic migration and the change in educational attainment.”
And the findings?
“Despite all the attention lavished on places like Manhattan or Chicago’s central core, virtually all the fastest-emerging economies coming out of the recession are either in the Southeast, Texas, the Great Plains or the Intermountain West. Of our top 10 metro areas, only one is on the east or west coast: 10th-ranked San Jose/Silicon Valley.”
Austin and San Antonio are Nos. 1 and 2. Denver is seventh, Seattle 14th.
And our Democratic governor, legislature and Denver mayor should take note: “Most of the strongest local economies combine the positive characteristics associated with blue states — educated people, tech-oriented industries, racial diversity — with largely red, pro-business administrations.”
The bottom third of the rankings are littered with cities such as Detroit (inevitably, 52), Providence, Riverside, Cleveland, Hartford and Los Angeles. So Seattle’s standing is relatively strong. But even so, as Kotkin points out, “Places like Nashville [5], Denver and Salt Lake [3] are all getting smarter faster, increasing their numbers of educated people faster than ‘brain’ regions such as Seattle (14th), San Francisco (22nd), Boston (26th), New York (31st), Chicago (40th) and Los Angeles (44th).”
Now, these sorts of comparisons are always tricky, of course, and gloss over all sorts of quality-of-life concerns that influence where people live. As an exasperated California Gov. Jerry Brown once quipped after deflecting another comparison of the economic vitality of his state vs. Texas, “Would you rather live in Houston or Santa Barbara, or maybe Santa Monica or San Francisco?”
For most of us, the answer is self-evident — but unless you’re a well-heeled professional with highly valued skills, the question of where you’d rather live is hardly relevant. You are likely to go where opportunity beckons and where housing is affordable, including single-family homes if you have children.
The Wall Street Journal reported this past week, for example, that by some measures San Francisco is “the worst U.S. city to be a middle-class home buyer.” And that’s a huge problem at the moment, since Bay Area jobs are blooming again.
“Looking across the board,” Kotkin writes, “the best places to look for work, or invest, will be those that have diversified their economies, kept costs down and attracted a broad cross-section of migrants from other parts of the country.”
If our political and civic leaders don’t blow it with the sort of policies that have hobbled other metro areas, greater Denver should be able to prosper for many years to come.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
