Slowly but surely seems to be the motto of Market Watch this year as it handed the #1 Best City for Business award to a city that is traditionally slow but steady in economic development: Des Moines, Iowa, with a population of 556,230.
This traditional slow regional economy is one of those cities qualified to the study after MarketWatch chose to expand its qualification criteria and accept cities that have at least 500,000 in population. This increased the number of qualified cities from 50 last year to 101 in 2009. This increased the number of economies that were studied after enduring the country's toughest economic crisis since The Great Depression.
The key to the stellar performance of Des Moines in the rankings is its top-four performance in all but one criterias of the ranking. It was not able to get on top of any of the criterias, but its consistency paved the way for ranking supremacy. The city's best performance is in the unemployment category, where it placed third at 6% in September, far from the 9.8% average unemployment that month.
However, Des Moines performed worst in the concentration of Fortune 1000 companies, where it only landed 41st among 101 countries. It is really unsurprising, given the laid back nature of Des Moines. Stellar performances in specialty industries like finance and insurance compared to their contemporaries also played a vital role, along with the Des Moines' being the state capital of Iowa, which could make a lot of impact when it comes to job generation.
Over the last 20 years, it has consistently grown its downtown area, maintained its popularity among the citizens, and still has that clean city air relative to its competitors.
Rounding up the Top 10 were Washington, D.C.; Omaha, Neb.; two-time chart-topper Minneapolis-St. Paul; Boston, Mass.; Boise, Idaho; Denver, Colo.; Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas; and Bridgeport, Conn.
