Chicago ranked #1 again at Site selection once again by a large margin.
This news has been out for days but no one is tooting the horn.
http://www.lawndalenews.com/2017/03/...secutive-year/
Chicago Ranked Top Corporate Metro for Fourth Consecutive Year
Posted by Editor on March 2, 2017 in Business | Comments Off on Chicago Ranked Top Corporate Metro for Fourth Consecutive Year
http://siteselection.com/issues/2017...ns-of-2016.cfm
Sorting the 2016 data by company name reveals that Accenture, for instance, has chosen to invest in locations in three Tier-1 Top 10 metros:
No. 1 Chicago; No. 7 Washington, DC; and No. 8 Columbus, Ohio. Amazon ... well, they seem to be investing everywhere, don’t they?
But everywhere in this case means multiple investments apiece in Chicago, No. 2 Dallas-Ft. Worth, No. 4 New York and No. 5 Cincinnati.
The Windy City keeps coming up.
There are reasons for that, says Matthew T. McGuire, who served under President Obama as the US executive director at The World Bank Group. A financial services executive from Chicago, he previously served as director of the Office of the Business Liaison at the U.S. Department of Commerce, which under Chicago native Obama was headed by a third Chicagoan, Penny Pritzker.
World Business Chicago worked with more than 180 companies in 2016, in coordination with the City, bringing nearly 9,000 jobs to Chicago. McGuire says Chicago is a great example of a competitive global city, due to such factors as its central location, a strong cadre of universities, hard-wired digital economy infrastructure from the days of the first Mayor Daley, and forward-looking transport infrastructure harkening to the city’s role as “hog butcher for the world,” in poet Carl Sandburg’s memorable phrase.
“It’s probably my favorite city,” McGuire says. As for its secret, “There is something to the agglomeration of young, talented, entrepreneurial people” in a place where they “want to be around other people doing exciting things.”
No wonder investment research firm PitchBook found early this year that the city led even the Bay Area and New York when measured by percentage of profitable startups.
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Diversified and Dependable
In remarks at last year’s TrustBelt conference in his city, Mayor Rahm Emanuel offered ballast for those remarks, noting not only the metro area’s 16 four-year schools (more than any city but Boston) but its steady flow of talent from Big 10 universities throughout the Upper Midwest.
“Every year and summer, like clockwork, around 140,000 freshly minted four-year degrees land in Chicago to start their career,” he said. Moreover, the city’s community colleges, which have about 115,000 enrolled, have been revamped to add more industry-sector specialization — for example, healthcare at Malcolm X, transportation and logistics at Harvey — to keep companies of all sizes supplied with the workforce they need.
Analysis released in February by Peter Bernstein, vice president at RCF Economic & Financial Consulting, Inc., shows that the
Chicago area and the rest of Illinois both suffered substantial job losses during the Great Recession, but only the Chicago area has recovered its lost jobs, and in fact the area reached an all-time high in employment in 2016. Greater Chicago accounts for 85 percent of all private sector jobs added in the state of Illinois since the Great Recession.
Emanuel also noted the metro area’s leading position when it comes to economic diversification. “No one sector of our economy drives more than 13 percent of our employment,” he said. That’s why analyses from sources such as IBM, The Economist and A.T. Kearney keep ranking the city at the very top in terms of competitiveness and FDI attractiveness. He pointed to the four Ts: talent, transportation, technology and transparency. That final element has been crucial as the city has dug itself out of a structural deficit over the past five years, resolving pension fund revenue streams while still growing the economy. “Businesses small, medium and large want to see certainty, but also see the public sector use its political will to address its challenges,” Emanuel said. “We have not ever shrunk from it. Denial is not a long-term strategy. Our strategy is to double down on the key elements of our economic strengths while addressing the challenges.”
Parochialism isn’t a long-term play either. The stakes are too big.
“For 30 or 40 years, it was Chicago versus the suburbs.” he said. “It’s not true — it’s metro Chicago versus metro Los Angeles, metro Tokyo and metro Berlin.”
....
Texas brags though
http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/n...-expanded.html
Texas top state for number of new, expanded corporate facilities for fifth consecutive year
Mar 6, 2017, 1:05pm CST
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