Best Cities to Live After Graduation
Looking for the right place to launch your professional career? Experts say some American cities are weathering the recession better than others and, when you put the numbers on the table, it appears you really can’t mess with Texas.
‘It ends up being about jobs’
When Joel Kotkin graduated from the UC-Berkeley in 1975, he worked as a “Washington Post” stringer in the San Francisco Bay area for six months before migrating to the media metropolis of Los Angeles. Today, the urban futures professor and author of the upcoming “The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050” might have followed a different path.
“At the end of the day, it ends up being about jobs and job prospects and where you can afford to live,” Kotkin said. “People are going to have to look much more at choices, at places that would not be at the top of their list if it were up to them.”
Cities in the Great Plains and throughout Texas are showing real signs of vitality and could be great places to land the right job, he said. That’s because they avoided the burst of the housing bubble, invested in infrastructure and can still tout job growth in an ailing economy.
Others also have spotted the trend. The Milken Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in California, put not one, not two, but four Texas cities in its list of top five best performing cities in the U.S. this year. Their rankings looked at job growth and local wages. Salt Lake City and Durham, N.C. also fared well in the annual survey.
“If you want to live on your own, you want to go to places that have jobs,” Kotkin said.
The Numbers
More than one of every 10 Americans is now out of work, according to the United States Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Michigan has been the hardest hit, with an unemployment rate lingering around 15 percent, followed by Nevada, Rhode Island and California, bureau officials said. States further from the coast have posted the healthiest numbers; unemployment in North Dakota near the end of the 2009 hovered at 4.2 percent. Nebraska and South Dakota also posted low numbers.
There are some signs of growth, according to job figures generated by Monster.Com. Near the end of 2009, online recruitment activity increased in eight of 28 U.S. metropolitan areas, Monster.Com officials said. The health care, public administration and natural resources industries generated the greatest increase in online activity.
Oklahoma City could serve as a model for other metropolitan areas. Plagued by recession in the 1980s, the city invested in construction projects, which, in turn, created jobs and stimulated the local economy.
Today, unemployment in OKC is below six percent – one of the lowest metropolitan rates in the country – and jobs are available in biosciences, aviation and aerospace. Foreclosures have not ravaged the city, as they have others, and the cost of housing remains more than 10 percent below the national average, said Roy Williams, president and CEO of the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce.
“It just costs less here to build and costs less here to live,” Williams said. “Those wages go further and thus your buying power goes further.”
The ‘best’ cities
The media has not been shy about making its own predictions about the best places to live, work and play.
Forbes said first-time job seekers should look to San Jose, Cambridge, Mass. and Houston. Houston, home of Rice University, also showed up in U.S. News and World Report’s list of 15 under-priced college towns, alongside Atlanta and College Station, Texas. Businessweek said Indianapolis is the right place to look for the first job out of school. Indianapolis, average rent rate: $625, also topped a CNN report on top cities for new grads. In that survey, cities like Cincinnati and Cleveland beat out New York City, average rent rate: $1,548.
Terri Ellerington knows a little bit about those rankings. She’s a fourth-generation Boulder County, Col. resident and helps sell real estate in tiny Louisville, Col., 2000 population: 18,937, which Money magazine recently ranked the best small town to live in the whole country.
A home in Louisville – unlike the Kentucky city, here they pronounce the “S” – starts at $280,000 but there are condominiums available for half of that. But you get a lot when you buy real estate there: good neighbors, a short commute to both Boulder and Denver, and a historic downtown area, Ellerington said.
“Even though we’ve continued over the years to grow … it still has a hometown feel to it,” she said.
Sources:
The Milken Institute: Best Performing Cities
Forbes: Best cities for first-time job seekers
Businessweek: Best places to launch a career
CNN and CareerBuilder: Best cities for new college graduates