Seattle - America’s Fastest Recovering Cities
Seattle WA - According to Forbes Magazine Seattle ranks 15 out of the top 100 metropolitan areas for the fastest-recovering cities from the current recession. That’s not to say they have recovered yet, but are poised to do so as we come out of the recession.
The top cities on this list have diversified industry’s and relatively stable housing fundamentals that have provided local residents with comparatively secure standards of living. Seattle was ranked 5th overall on the Forbes survey for retail sales, and ranked high on gross metropolitan product (GMP) growth in the past year, and a low home foreclosure rate. Add up these three measures alone and Seattle would have easily been one of the top 10 cities on the survey.
What’s more, Seattle area home prices never ascended to the unsustainable levels the rest of the country hit at the peak of the housing bubble. Thus, it didn’t crash as hard. These factors have toughened the local economy against a recession that is inextricably tied to real estate.
To form this list, Forbes Magazine ranked the 100 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas — geographic entities that the U.S. Office of Management and Budget defines and uses in collecting statistics — in five categories: unemployment rate, GMP (a measure of the size of a city’s economy), foreclosures, home prices and sales rates.
Forbes ranked September unemployment rates (the most recent available by metro) using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; the percentage of a metro’s homes in foreclosure with September data provided by RealtyTrac; and the change in GMP between the first and second quarter of 2009 from the Brookings Institution’s Metro Monitor. They also included the second-quarter 2009 year-over-year change in Freddie Mac’s Conventional Mortgage Home Price Index — a measure of housing price inflation — and the average days on the market for properties currently on sale, to measure sales rates. They then averaged the scores for each measure to arrive at an overall ranking.
The magazine stated that ”areas where home prices don’t fluctuate wildly are particularly well-positioned to ride out this recession, because they were spared the domino effect of foreclosures, lost jobs and lost productivity”.
Seattle was the number one city on the entire West Coast & in the Western Region as a whole. The next West Coast cities on the list were Silicon Valley’s San Jose, California in at number 56 and then Portland, Oregon right behind at 57.
There’s a lesson to be learned from the cities at the top of the list, some of which aren’t economically thriving, but all of which are well-equipped to emerge from the recession in a similar position to where they started. Rather than chasing rising home prices or apparently plentiful jobs in one-industry towns, families looking for long-term economic stability should seek spots where industry is diverse and housing price shifts are benign…like Seattle, Washington.
However, I believe that Western Washington has a lot more going for itself with it’s natural beauty and quality of life we share in this region vs most of the cities ahead of us on the survey list.
Jerry Campbell - The Muljat Group - Bellingham WA - Bellingham Real Estate