It's been six years since the Great Recession technically ended.
Since
then, job numbers have come back up, and unemployment has gone back down. In
April 2014, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the number of US
private sector jobs had finally returned to their pre-crash peak.
But not
all cities have recovered equally.
"We
know every city was hit hard," says Glassdoor's chief economist, Andrew
Chamberlain, who's been looking at which areas are still struggling six years
later, and which places are now booming.
The short
answer: Go West, young man. Of the top 10 cities on Glassdoor's "Recovery
Index," seven are in the Western states, and five of the top 15 are in
Texas alone.
Chamberlain
looked at three criteria to get his ranking: how much the unemployment rate has
dropped in the years since 2009, how much job growth each city has seen since
2009, and how much wages have increased since 2009.
That
doesn't tell us everything. "It doesn't tell us anything about the
inequalities in cities, for example," he notes. "It doesn't tell us
about side-lined workers who have left the labor force." And it doesn't
look at where cities were before the recession; what we're looking at here is
the growth (or lack thereof) that's happened since then.
The three
indicators still paint a pretty good picture of recovery, Chamberlain tells
Business Insider. Based on those metrics, here are the top 15 cities that have
rebounded the most since the recession:
1. Midland, Texas (-2.7% unemployment since 2009, 30% job growth,
27% wage growth)
2. Odessa, Texas (-4.6% unemployment, 26% job growth, 20% wage growth)
3. San Jose -
Sunnyvale - Santa Clara, California (-6.3% unemployment, 25% job growth, 14% wage growth)
4. Greeley,
Colorado (-3.9% unemployment, 28% job growth, 7% wage growth)
5. Provo-Orem,
Utah (-3.8%
unemployment, 24% job growth, 10% wage growth)
6. Laredo, Texas (-4.0% unemployment, 24% job growth, 9% wage
growth)
7. Houston - The
Woodlands - Sugar Land, Texas (-3.3% unemployment, 19% job growth, 13% wage increase)
8. Ames, Iowa (-2.3% unemployment, 21% job growth, 12% wage growth)
9. Charlotte -
Concord - Gastonia, North Carolina-South Carolina (-6.5% unemployment, 19% job growth, 10% wage growth)
10. Oklahoma
City, Oklahoma (-2.4%
unemployment, 19% job growth, 14% wage growth)
11. Naples -
Immokalee - Marco Island, Florida (-6.2% unemployment, 23% job growth, 5% wage
growth)
12. Austin -
Round Rock, Texas (-3.6%
unemployment, 23% job growth, 7% wage growth)
13. Columbia,
Missouri (-2.3%
unemployment, 16% job growth, 13% wage growth)
14. Raleigh,
North Carolina (-4.1%
unemployment, 18% job growth, 9% wage growth)
15. Burlington,
North Carolina (-6.7%
unemployment, 17% job growth, 8% wage growth)
What to
make of it? "This is an oil and gas story," Chamberlain says,
bluntly. Midland, Odessa, and Greeley all top the list thanks to the boom in
hydraulic fracking, according to Chamberlain.
San Jose,
Provo, Charlotte, and Raleigh, meanwhile, are all "places where there have
been technology booms," he continues. San Jose is obvious because it's the
center of tech, but Provo has a powerful start up culture, too, as do Charlotte
and Raleigh.
"All
the cities in which the tech industries is growing fast have universities
nearby that feed skilled workers into those companies," he says. But while
tech depends on a constant flow of new graduates, the oil and gas industries
are "quite a different story," demographically speaking.
In
Midland and Odessa, for example, there's a tremendous need for oil field
service workers coming from blue-collar trade backgrounds.
It's not
necessarily surprising the oil, gas, and tech industries are fueling growth in
these 15 cities, but the data here does provide an important lesson, according
to Chamberlain: "All labor markets are local." Midland, Texas, can
have a robust economy even while the economy in Ocean City, New Jersey, flails.
(Ocean City comes in last on the list, coming in at number 327).
That's
information you can act on: You can't control economic trends, but you can — to
some degree, at least — control where you live. "The rapid migration away
from cities like Detroit and toward cities like Phoenix in recent years largely
reflects this type of migration: workers moving away from poorly performing
cities toward areas with rapidly growing job markets," he says.