The big cities on the coasts don't crack the top nine metros leading the post-pandemic jobs recovery, according to a new report from the Economic Innovation Group.
Superstar metros such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and D.C. are still magnets for job growth and talent, but a slew of smaller cities are joining their ranks.
"The primary reason why these metros are leading the recovery is that they were seeing very robust job growth in the two years prior to the pandemic," says August Benzow, research lead at EIG.
- "The pandemic itself was just a bump in the road. It didn't knock them off their strong trajectories."
Even these hot growth metros aren't immune to pandemic pain.
- "Despite the strong performance of these metros, all of them except Salt Lake City still have significantly fewer leisure and hospitality jobs than they did before the pandemic," Benzow notes.
- "And some are doing very well in some sectors and less well in other sectors," he says. "Phoenix, for example, has 26,090 fewer manufacturing jobs than it did in December 2019, but has gained 172,030 construction jobs."