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I’m never satisfied with summaries like Forbes Best Places For Business And Careers. I wanted to see how Tacoma really stacked up against others and I also wanted to see if Tacoma had really improved, and in what areas.

Here’s a summary that I put together (Forbes Tacoma Ranking - 1999 to 2008 - PDF) to track Tacoma’s ranking from 1999 to 2008.

Some things gleaned from the summary. Note that these are rankings against other cities so they are not an objective measure of improvement or decline locally.

• Tacoma’s overall ranking went from 64 in 1999 to a high of 135 in 2003 then improved to 43 (out of 200) this year.
• Big declines in overall ranking happened in 2001 and 2003, however the change in 2003 could have been due to a major change the way Forbes calculated the rankings. They abandoned the High Tech influence as a major factor.
• From 2004 to 2006 there was a significant change in how the population’s education was factored into the ranking. That seemed to help Tacoma.
• In 2008 Tacoma scored well on Income Growth, Culture & Leisure, and Job Growth, but poorly on Cost of Living, Crime Rate and Educational Attainment.
• Cost of doing business fluctuated compared to other cities since 2003, but Tacoma gained back the ground it lost.
• Cost of living has hit Tacoma’s ranking, possibly due to relatively fast housing price increases.
• Our crime rate has plummeted us from 113th to 185th in that category. I guess that’s an area that could improve.
• Educational Attainment has also been in steady decline, but not as bad as Crime Rate.
• Culture and leisure has been a relatively strong suit.
• Net Migration’s decline means that more people moved into some other cities than they did to ours.

Bottom line for me is that it’s difficult to put any weight behind the Forbes overall ranking (#43) because the standards have changed too much. It’s becoming useful again as a scorecard of local change and will continue as long as they don’t make any other significant changes to their method.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 5:14 pm and is filed under FeedTacoma.com, Tacoma Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.