The Good, Bad, and the Sluggish: Which Areas Are Recovering Fastest?

If you have friends and family living in other parts of the country, chances are you’ve heard about how much better their state is doing compared to yours—or how much worse. With a country as large and diverse as the US, it’s tough to make generalizations about how we’re recovering from the recession, especially when disparities exist city to city. This past summer, Wallethub took the economic pulse of the US’s 150 most populous cities. They tracked everything form the increase of college-educated workers and the ratio of full- to part-time jobs to the rates of bankruptcy and public assistance. The surprising (or maybe unsurprising) results allowed them to rank the cities from 1 to 150. Here are the top and bottom of the list:

Most Recovered: 1. Laredo, TX 2. Irving, TX 3. Fayetteville, NC 4. Denver, CO 5. Dallas, TX 6. Corpus Christi, TX 7. Minneapolis, MN 8. Lubbock, TX 9. Garland, TX 10. Raleigh, NC

Least Recovered: 150. San Bernardino, CA 149. Stockton, CA 148. Boise City, ID 147. Newark, NJ 146. Modesto, CA 145. Detroit, MI 144. Cape Coral, FL 143. Tucson, AZ 142. Glendale, AZ 141. Tempe, AZ

It’s worth noting that there can be disparities even within a single state.  For instance, California has many of the least-recovered cities in the country, but it’s also home to San Francisco, which ranked 20^th thanks largely to the strength of Silicon Valley jobs. Florida is a similar case. Miami ranked 18^th even while on the other side of the peninsula, Cape Coral fell into the bottom ten. That being said, if you’re on the hunt for a new city, the data almost universally points to Texas. Maybe that isn’t what you want to hear, but it’s difficult to argue with Texas right now. Their cities dominate the top 30% of Wallethub’s  lists, which may be largely due to the fact that many Texan cities have proved almost recession-proof. The state was the least affected when the housing bubble burst in 2007, and since then, they have remained the steadiest, economy-wise, of almost all the states in the union.