Not surprising to anyone who lives here, Murfreesboro was listed as one of the fastest-growing economies in the nation by personal finance website Wallethub.com.
The Boro came in 12th overall and in sixth place for mid-sized cities. For comparison, Nashville ranked fifth for large cities, but somehow didn't rank on the overall list.
"To determine where the fastest local economic growth has occurred in the U.S., WalletHub’s analysts compared 515 cities of varying population sizes based on 15 key measures of both growth and decline over a period of seven years. Our dataset ranges from population growth to unemployment rate decrease to growth in regional GDP per capita," said Richie Bernardo, Wallethub senior writer.
Murfreesboro ranked 12th for "sociodemographics" and 47th for "jobs & economy." Apparently, the writers haven't driven down Medical Center Parkway lately. If they had, we likely would have ranked higher on job growth.
By sociodemographic, Wallethub’s experts considered population growth, working-age population growth and college-age population growth (thanks, MTSU).
Jobs and economy included job growth, ratio of full-time to part-time jobs, median household income, unemployment and poverty rate, among about 10 other data points.
“Finally, we determined each city’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its total score and used the resulting scores to rank-order the cities in our sample,” Bernardo said.
For other Tennessee cities, Memphis ranked 62nd on the large city list while Clarksville ranked 111th, Chattanooga 117th, and Knoxville 170th on the mid-sized city list.
The top five cities were Frisco, Texas, Kent, Wash., Lehigh Acres, Fla., and Meridian, Ind.
You can read the full report at 2017’s Fastest-Growing Cities in America.