Today's Boom Towns and Ghost Towns

Job Growth Change, 2009-2013

Richard Florida points out changes in the job market from 2009-2013:

One thing I didn’t foresee in 2009 was the stunning rise of America’s energy belt—a region stretching from Houston to Oklahoma City to New Orleans and their surrounding areas that in 2011, by my estimation, produced some $750 billion in total economic output, more than Switzerland or Sweden. The Sun Belt features two kinds of regional economies: declining real-estate economies and booming energy economies. Energy stands alongside knowledge as the second pillar of America’s recovery.
Cities like Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Bismarck and Fargo in North Dakota have experienced strong growth since the crisis, and fracking has brought flush times to out-of-the-way places in North Dakota, Wyoming, and other parts of the country. Several commentators have argued that places with energy-based economies or natural-resource-based economies, not knowledge metros, have been the real stars of the recovery. That goes too far. To put things in perspective, the economist Paul Krugman noted in March 2012 that while “employment in oil and gas extraction has risen more than 50 percent since the middle of the last decade … that amounts to only 70,000 jobs, around one-twentieth of one percent of total U.S. employment.”
The metros where low-wage jobs make up the largest share of job growth since 2009 are in the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt: St. Louis (where 90 percent of new jobs are low-wage); California’s so-called Inland Empire of Riverside–San Bernardino (where nearly three-quarters of new jobs are low-wage); New Orleans; Tampa; Orlando; Columbus, Ohio; and Rochester, New York (where more than half of new jobs are low-wage). Temp jobs account for an extraordinarily large share of recent job growth in Memphis, Birmingham, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Cleveland.

Not surprisingly, in this era of federal support for the economy, Washington D.C. is seeing a massive increase in high-wage jobs.  I was fascinated that Grand Rapids shows up so big in the map above.  I know they've become a biotech center, but I don't know if that is providing most of the growth there.  I'm also not as encouraged as he is about the potential of the energy sector to provide real growth, because our dependence on oil and gas is a broad tax on the entire economy.