Two of the best cities to ride out a recession are here in North Carolina, study finds
North Carolina is home to some of the best places to ride out a recession, a national study finds.
Raleigh and Cary were just named among the most “recession-proof” cities in the country, results released Thursday show.
To come up with the rankings, financial website SmartAsset says it evaluated jobs, housing and the use of public assistance in the country’s largest 264 cities.
Among the North Carolina cities, Cary came out on top.
The suburb west of Raleigh ranked No. 8 after getting top scores for employment and housing, results show. The town of roughly 168,000 had one of the highest rates of participation in the workforce, according to the findings.
“Census Bureau data shows that Cary performs the best for the lowest housing costs as a percentage of income in the entire study, at less than 17%,” SmartAsset said.
Just down on the SmartAsset list, Raleigh snagged a No. 9 spot. The state’s second largest city earned a high score in the housing category, which measures delinquent mortgage rates, costs in relation to income and other factors.
The city “performs particularly well for change in home value during the Great Recession, at an increase of almost 8% during that time,” SmartAsset said.
Also making it into the top 25 was nearby Durham, which landed a No. 18 spot.
Resisting a recession
“I know Raleigh is resilient to recessions,” Mark Vitner, a senior Wells Fargo economist in Charlotte, told The News & Observer. “Employment tends to fall less in recessions in the Triangle and it tends to rebound sooner. Now, the Triangle was the first area in the state to recover from the Great Recession.”
Vitner says that over a third of the Triangle’s economy is in resilient industries like state government, universities and hospitals.
”Government and healthcare, at least in the very near term, are likely to increase employment,” he said.
The sector in the state that would be the hardest hit during a recession would be manufacturing and distribution, which the Triangle’s economy isn’t based on as much as other places.
”I would say that the U.S. economy may be able to ward off a recession just because we’ve had so much [economic] momentum going into this,” he said.
But growth in the second quarter is likely to slow and a big part of that growth slowdown is going to be due to a drop in inventories.
Earning national acclaim
It’s not the first time the Triangle-area cities have gotten recognition.
Last month, the housing website Curbed named Raleigh one of the most livable cities in the country. The area also recently ranked among the best places for quality of life and millennials looking to move, The News & Observer reported.
Also this year, a Commercial Cafe study found Durham was a top city for women working in science, technology, engineering and math.
And Cary ranked No. 11 in the country for millennial home buyers, according to a separate SmartAsset study.
The Triangle area is home to universities and several technology companies. Some studies have cited those factors in their results.
Overall, SmartAsset says the the most “recession-resistant” place is Frisco, Texas. The city is roughly 25 miles north of downtown Dallas.
Though SmartAsset only includes top-25 scores, the website says Detroit had the biggest unemployment surge. Also landing toward the bottom of the list was San Bernardino, California, which saw home values taper off the most, results show.
This story was originally published March 10, 2020 at 1:41 PM with the headline "Two of the best cities to ride out a recession are here in North Carolina, study finds."
