Seattle rises to the top spot in our 2020 rankings, driven by a diverse set of favorable macroeconomic conditions. As COVID-19 arrived in the U.S. earlier this year, the state of Washington immediately found itself in the spotlight. When a nursing home in Kirkland, an eastside suburb of Seattle, became the nation’s first known case of community spread, Seattle’s economic outlook dimmed.
Despite its dark spring, the Emerald City is already regaining its glisten. By September 1, Seattle charted as the fourth lowest-risk area in the top 50, according to the Harvard Global Health Institute’s COVID Risk Map. After establishing the most comprehensive statewide database in the country, Washington state bolstered its prowess in testing and tracing cases, helping its economy recover quicker and more sustainably than its fellow compatriots.
Before the recession, Seattle led all U.S. cities in local wage growth, registering a weighty 7.4% year-over-year increase, sustained in large part by the city’s tech industry. Seattle’s relative dominance in tech and other STEM-area job growth has attracted a wave of higher-earning renters, benefiting its multifamily sector. Through July 2020, the Seattle MSA was back to growth, with employment jumping 1.8% month-over-month, edging out the national average by more than half a percent. This was calculated using seasonally-adjusted metrics measured by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Chart 7).
While no metro labor market was spared from the pandemic-provoked crisis, by June, Seattle’s employment base was down only 4.0% from the prior year. Similarly sized cities did not fare nearly as well. Detroit, comparable in size and growth to Seattle before to the recession, suffered the worse job losses nationwide. Its employment base shrank by an incredible -18.2% from a year ago (Chart 8). Meanwhile, Minneapolis and Phoenix, which ranked closely behind Seattle in the final rankings, saw more muted job losses of -5.8% and -6.3%, respectively.