2021 Best Performing Cities - Grand Junction Included in List for "Best Small City"
The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel
By DAN WEST
Published: 3/2/2021
Grand Junction is moving up the ranks of a nonpartisan think tank’s 2021 Best Performing Cities for best small city.
After moving up 24 spots from 2019, the city is now ranked 57th out of 201 small cities that were included in the Milken Institute’s annual report. The report ranks cities based on a number of criteria including job growth, wage growth, size of the tech industry, broadband access and housing affordability.
Grand Junction Economic Partnership’s Executive Director Robin Brown said the city first appeared in the report in 2017 when it ranked 189th. It has improved its ranking every year since to 131st in 2018 and 81st last year.
Brown said she thought efforts to diversify the local economy were a factor in the continual improvement in the report’s rankings. She said in the third quarter of 2019, the city saw job growth despite losing jobs in the energy sector.
“I think the Milken Institute report just verifies what we are seeing on the ground,” she said. “It confirms what we believe, which is that we are diversifying the economy.”
One highlight from the 2020 report, Brown said, was that the city ranked 12th overall for job growth over a 12-month period in 2019-2020.
She said they don’t have final job growth numbers for 2020, but that the report was a good indication that the city performed well.
“We thought we had pretty good job growth,” Brown said. “We don’t know that yet, but again it kind of confirms what we saw on the ground. We had a lot of companies relocate to the area. We had a lot of remote workers, which aren’t even counted in this.”
An important piece of the report was on housing affordability, Brown said. Some of the largest drops in the Milken Institute’s rankings came in cities that had more expensive housing markets.
“One of the most interesting things about the report was when you look at the cities that have gained, they all have affordable housing,” Brown said. “Housing is a problem in the cities that lost the most spots, which makes sense.”
The report does have a focus on the tech industry, Brown said. She said they have recently completed a plan to promote the tech industry in the city and to encourage people who can work remotely to relocate to Grand Junction.
“We wrote a digital economy plan on how to attract more of the digital economy and that is everything from tech companies, software development,” Brown said. “It’s an assessment of the workforce we have here and the programs that create the workforce that we need.”
The report has not yet been released, but has been completed, she said. Going forward, Brown said she hopes the city will continue to move up the rankings, cracking into the top 50.
“It’s fun especially after a year like 2020 to continue to see growth in the areas we want to see growth,” Brown said. “So we’re excited about it, and we hope to continue to move on up that list.”
According to its website, the Milken Institute is a nonpartisan, publicly supported organization that was founded in 1991 by Michael Milken, an American financier.
For the full Daily Sentinel article visit: https://www.gjsentinel.com/.
For the full Milken Institute Report visit: https://milkeninstitute.org/reports/best-performing-cities-2021.
