The Baltimore area had the third-highest income growth among the nation's largest metro areas over the past 25 years, in both the short term and the long term, a study released Wednesday showed.
Portfolio.com, a business news website, ranked income growth in 100 U.S. cities using a quarter-century's worth of federal income data. The analysis put El Paso, Texas, in first place and placed Baton Rouge, La., second, followed by Baltimore, the Virginia Beach-Norfolk, Va., area and New Orleans.
Researchers analyzed 25 time spans ending in 2009, ranging from a single year to 25 years, to determine the strength of per-capita income growth for each market. The index gave equal weight to long, medium and short terms.
"We were just trying to measure actual growth in personal income over a long time frame," said G. Scott Thomas, the report's author and project editor for Portfolio.com, which is owned by American City Business Journals Inc. "We wanted to take a longer look at how incomes are changing in various areas."
The study in general found that the biggest increases came in midsize American communities rather than larger metro areas such as New York City, which ranked 35th.
Baltimore ranked no lower than the top 20 in any of the 25 separate time intervals in the current survey, which helped boost it in the overall rankings, Thomas said. The metro area showed a gain in per-capita income between 2008 and 2009, the most recent time frame analyzed, an unusual feat during the recession when almost every other part of the country saw a decrease, Thomas said.
The short-term findings "seem to indicate that Baltimore has enjoyed more robust income growth than [almost] any other market in the country over the last one to two years," said Anirban Basu, chief executive officer of Baltimore-based economic consulting firm Sage Policy Group. "That's true not just of Baltimore, but Maryland in general."
He said Maryland is one of only two states in the country — along with Alaska — that can boast a level of personal income above the pre-recession highs.
"That's consistent with the notion that the Baltimore-Washington broader economic recovery has been more robust than much of the balance of the country," Basu said. "Baltimore is adding jobs more quickly and higher-quality jobs than the rest of the nation. One of the reasons is continued expansion of federal activities and health care," both of which produce middle- to high-income jobs.
Basu said he was more surprised by the finding of long-term personal income growth in the Baltimore metro area, but said that could be attributed to progress in making the shift away from an industrial and manufacturing-based economy over the past quarter-century.
"New segments of the economy have emerged to replace those jobs and some of those segments are high-wage segments," with the expansion of medical research, health care and defense technologies, Basu said.
The income-growth study is the fourth of its kind by Portfolio.com. Baltimore ranked No. 13 in the study in 2009.
"It's refreshing to see that the cities with the best opportunities for income growth go beyond the major metros," said J. Jennings Moss, editor of Portfolio.com. "When you consider the current high rate of unemployment in this country, our study suggest that people may want to explore job opportunities or start businesses in smaller cities like Baton Rouge and Oklahoma City where income growth is higher and the economy has been relatively stable in comparison to other parts of the U.S."
Though El Paso had the highest income growth, it also has one of the lowest per-capita incomes, at $28,638.
Most cities in the top 10 have about 1 million or fewer inhabitants, except for the Baltimore and Pittsburgh metro areas, which both have populations of more than 2 million.
lorraine.mirabella@baltsun.com
Cities with the highest income growth
1.El Paso, Texas
2.Baton Rouge, La.
3.Baltimore
4.Virginia Beach-Norfolk, Va.
5.New Orleans
6.Pittsburgh
7.Oklahoma City
8.Little Rock, Ark.
9.Jackson, Miss.
10.Honolulu
Source: Portfolio.com