America’s Up-And-Coming Boom Towns

Of SmartAsset’s 50 fastest growing metropolises in the nation, six Northwestern cities finished in the top 10, according to The New York Times, though Murfreesboro, Tennessee came out on top thanks to its minuscule unemployment rate and fast-growing median household income. The rankings compared population growth and household income to the region’s total number of businesses and housing units over a five year period.

Just behind Murfreesboro were two small Idaho metros with booming population growth and promising increases in household income.

Six cities in the Northwest finished in the top 10 — three in Washington, two in Idaho and one in Oregon. But the city that came out on top was Murfreesboro, Tenn., about 35 miles southeast of downtown Nashville, which finished in the top 20 percent of cities in most of the metrics the study considered. One was its August 2021 unemployment rate of just 3.4 percent. Another was its median household income, which grew by 38 percent over five years.

Nampa, Idaho, a suburb of Boise and Idaho’s third-largest city in its own right, finished second. There, the number of businesses grew by about 29 percent and median household income increased by 39 percent over those same five years. Right behind Nampa in third place was Meridian, Idaho, about 10 miles east, where the population grew by more than 31 percent from 2015 to 2020 and the August 2021 unemployment rate was 2.5 percent.

For the full list of America’s top boom towns …

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