This Is America’s Best-Performing City

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 27, 7:30AM EDT

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This Is America’s Best-Performing City — © DenisTangneyJr / iStock via Getty Images

American cities vary across a wide array of definitions of “best,” “best places to live,” “fast-growing” and “best to work.” Usually, the cities that do the most poorly are the old industrial cities like Detroit and Cleveland. The best cities are often those with large universities and high wages; San Jose, for example. Best places to live generally are smaller but have highly educated populations, low crime rates, good health care and outstanding municipal services.

The well-known Milken Institute, founded by the disgraced former junk bond trader who was sentenced to 10 years in jail and fined $600 million, has issued its “Best Performing Cities 2021: Foundations for Growth and Recovery.”

Some U.S. cities that did well were large, based on population, but that was not the case for many that were in the higher echelon of the rankings. Size isn’t everything, of course. According to World Population Review, the 10 largest U.S. cities by population are (in this order): New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas and San Jose. Yet in the Milken ranking of the nation’s best-performing cities for 2021, only three of those (Phoenix, Dallas and San Jose) were in the top 25 on the Milken list.

What does it mean to be a best-performing city? The institute bases its scores on an index of “jobs, wages, and high-tech growth while incorporating new measures of housing affordability and household broadband access.”
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To identify the best-performing large city in America, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the Milken Institute’s overall ranking of city performance. Each city’s score from last year is also included in the report. Total population figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey one-year estimates.

The top large city on this list is Provo, Utah, home to Brigham Young University. Utah also placed fourth with Salt Lake City. Palm Bay, Florida, on the state’s Atlantic Coast, ranked number two. Rounding out the top five were Austin, Texas, (number three) and Raleigh, North Carolina, (number five), both known for their universities and concentration of tech businesses.

Provo, Utah, ranked second in the 2020 study. It has a population of 649,603

Click here to see which 25 cities are best positioned for growth and recovery.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.