Nashville ranks 7th in list of Best Performing Cities in America

The Milkin Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan economic think tank that "works to improve lives around the world by advancing innovative economic and policy solutions that create jobs, widen access to capital, and enhance health,"  has just published their annual Best Performing Cities list and Nashville ranks number seven, up from 18 in 2015 on the Big Cities list which ranks the largest 200 cities in America.

Below is what they said of Nashville:

Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin, TN, ranks seventh in this year’s index, having shot up 11 places to enter the Top 10. Employment in the metro rose 10 percent faster than the national average from 2010 to 2015, and this explosive growth earned the region eighth place on the five-year job growth measure. The metro also earned eighth place in one- year high-tech GDP growth, but this was off a small base since high tech represents a much smaller share of the regional economy than it does in the national economy. However, despite not having the high-wage high-tech industries that have driven growth in the majority of the Top 25 best-performing cities, the Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin metro has experienced significant wage growth in recent years as the local labor market tightened, ranking 27th on the one-year measure and ninth on the five-year metric. Transportation equipment manufacturing, which includes auto manufacturing, has been a major contributor to the metro economy, with 900 jobs added in 2015.

The 10,000 jobs added since 2010 have more than made up for jobs lost during the recession. Despite cooling national demand, the region’s major manufacturers have announced multimillion-dollar investments in their local facilities, including $160 million pledged by Nissan to build a supplier park adjacent to its factory in Smyrna 39 and GM’s investing of more than $900 million in its plant in Spring Hill. With recent announcements of 650 new hires to staff a third shift to start in January 2017, GM clearly expects demand for its Cadillac XT5 and GMC Acadia lines to remain high. 40 Strong demand for office space and housing fueled by the growth of white-collar jobs and in-migration has stimulated growth in the construction sector. Employment for specialty trade contractors and in the construction of buildings combined rose by 3,750 in 2015.

Knoxville, Tennessee ranked 80th on the list, Chattanooga 101, and Memphis 149. All of Tennessee's large cities improved their ranking from 2015. If you read the report you can see the components that went in to the rankings. To view the report, follow this link.

Top Stories