Southwest Florida Experiencing Major Economic Growth
There’s great news for southwest Florida residents in a study released this month by Wallethub, a web-based credit reporting and analysis firm. The report focuses on the economic growth of over 500 U.S. cities in the last seven years and ranks them accordingly.
Wallethub uses a vast number of metrics to determine those rankings. These include demographic information such as population growth, working age population, and the percent of residents with college degrees.
They supplement these measures with statistics on the local economies, including job growth, median household income growth, unemployment and poverty rate decreases, growth in regional GDP per capita, increase in the number of businesses and startups, median house price growth, foreclosure rate decrease, building permit activity, and the increase in venture capital investment in each city.
In addition, cities were also listed in subgroups consisting of large cities (population of 300,000, or more) midsize cities (100,000 to 300,000), and small cities (fewer than 100,000 residents).
Nationally, the southern region of the U.S. registered the greatest gains in population growth, with eight of the fastest growing fifteen cities.
Florida, as a whole, scored very strongly, with Miami finishing second in the large city category and Tampa scoring number nineteen in that same grouping.
But a close look at the numbers reveals that southwest Florida truly stands out as an area experiencing major economic growth.
Of the 515 cities studied, Fort Myers finished at number one in the small city subgroup and, most impressively, number one again in overall score of all U.S. cities - Lehigh Acres finished seventh, and Cape Coral came in at number 24 among all U.S. cities.
In the subcategory of midsize cities Lehigh acres ranked fifth, while cape Coral finished twelfth.
Further analysis showed that nationally Lehigh Acres came in third in population growth, and Fort Myers was listed at fifth in job growth, and second in poverty rate decrease.
It would seem that with this kind of economic growth, the southwest Florida region has much to look forward to.