OPINION: It's not just lakes and forests
Raphael Barta
The North Idaho Business Journal's geographic readership area includes some of the most remote places in the Western U.S., but also some of the most sophisticated urban living too.
The Best-Performing Cities 2024 report by the Milken Institute placed the Coeur d’Alene MSA second in the nation in the small city category. The report focuses on 200 large and 203 small U.S. metropolitan areas. The 403 cities surveyed were ranked across 13 metrics, including opportunities for job growth, wage levels, economic opportunities, high-tech industry growth, income disparity, housing affordability, sustainable growth and climatic resiliency.
For those of us fortunate enough to live in North Idaho, the outdoor recreational opportunities are amazing, and still remarkably uncrowded. The Milken report does not take this access to nature into account, which makes it all the more interesting to see a different set of criteria. A significant amount of North Idaho land is protected status forest (U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, etc.) and there is still a rural feeling here, but as the North Idaho economy evolves from a concentration in resource extraction industries like mining and timber, sustainable growth and employment opportunities and the other criteria points of the Milken report become more important.
Coeur d’Alene has made the top 10 list for six years now, but there are many smaller communities in North Idaho that score high on the various metrics without the surge in population, traffic, and home prices. It is true that jobs are mostly created in the cities, where a larger and diverse demographic base provides skilled workers.
Employment in the information service sector is an important driver of Coeur d'Alene’s growth: wages in this sector grew by about 42% over the past three years, and workforce participation in the sector by 11%. Combined with a high tech sector growth rate of 64% over the same period, these two employment generators have vaulted the community into national prominence.
The report does not only focus on economic progress. Two of the criteria are social issues: income equality and housing affordability. The distribution of incomes is not heavily weighted toward the low end, think economically disadvantaged situations where only low-skilled, low paying jobs exist. And it is not skewed toward only high income earners either. (For you economists and academics out there, the Gini Index is 43.8.)
As for housing affordability, that is a huge challenge. Coeur d’Alene ranked near the bottom of the scale for that criteria point, an inescapable result of the vibrant regional economy plus the incredible natural amenities and overall lifestyle here in North Idaho. It’s no wonder that this area has been one of the fastest growing regions in the U.S. over the past five years.
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Raphael Barta is an associate broker with an active practice in residential, vacant land and commercial/investment properties (raphaelb@sandpoint.com).
The complete report can be read at https://Milkeninstitute.org/report/bestperformingcities.
