Want to escape jobless recovery? Try one of these Top 10 rebound cities.
Quick! Name the large US cities that now have more jobs than they did before the great recession.
Better yet, name the US cities whose employment has bounced back within two years of each of the last four recessions.
Trick question. There's only one city that meets the above criteria among the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the US, according to new data from the Brookings Institution.
The city? San Antonio.
IN PICTURES: Top 10 rebound cities for workers
Two years after the start of the 1981/82 recession, its employment was up 4.4 percent from prerecession levels. The 1990/91 recession: up 5.5 percent; 2001, exactly even with prerecession levels.
Even the great recession hasn't derailed San Antonio. Two years after the start of the worst economic downturn since the Depression, the metro area's employment is up 0.15 percent.
That may not sound great, but that's the third-best performance of any of America's 100 largest metropolitan areas, according to Brookings. (Technically, the study compared employment in the quarter in which a recession began with employment eight quarters later.) Only McAllen (No. 1) and Austin (No. 2), both in Texas, did better.
So what's San Antonio's secret?
It has a well-diversified economy built on services and manufacturing. The area of strength it shares with almost all the other Top 10 rebound cities is a large base of government employment.
In San Antonio's case, four military bases in the area have given the metro area some measure of stability.
Among the other Top 10, four are state capitals (Raleigh, N.C.; Little Rock, Ark.; Madison, Wis.; and Austin, Texas). Washington, D.C., not surprisingly, is one of the top rebound cities. So are Albuquerque, N.M., (Sandia National Laboratories and Kirtland US Air Force Base) and Virginia Beach, Va. (four military bases).
Nine of the Top 10 cities are located in the South or West. And except for San Antonio, all of them rebounded well in three of the recessions but got hit harder in the fourth.
"Recessions will affect different places differently," says Alec Friedhoff, a research analyst at Brookings.
Tech-heavy Austin has rebounded smartly from the great recession, but stumbled badly in the dot-com debacle in 2001, he points out. Fresno, Calif., looked recession-resilient in the first three contractions but couldn't escape California's housing collapse in the latest downturn.
So is it a smart to move to a Top 10 rebound city? Not necessarily.
"If you're coming from the industrial Midwest ... you're trained to build things. A lot of these places you wouldn't find those types of opporrtunities," Mr. Friedhoff says. "If you're in a real hard-hit area, it might be difficult to sell your house" and move.
Nevertheless, if you have the mobility and a Top 10 city has an industry you're skilled to work in, it doesn't hurt to have a little recession resilience on your side.
