Booming tech sectors and real estate often bond tightly. While the Bay Area continues to be the nation’s most robust tech center, tech-driven areas are popping up elsewhere across the U.S.
Indeed, more than two-thirds of tech workers now feel little or no need to live in the Bay Area, according to a recent article at Forbes.com. Instead, they’re finding opportunities in the Northeast, South, or Midwest, where home prices tend to be cheaper as well.
Forbes.com ranked 2017’s tech meccas (the cities looking to one day overthrow Silicon Valley for the ultimate title). These top-ranked cities are:
1. Salt Lake City: It was recently ranked by Entrepreneur as the top startup destination, outside of San Francisco or New York.
2. Denver.: Tech workplaces are expanding quickly here, led by Google’s $150 million office complex in Boulder, and the number of starts-ups are rapidly growing.
3. Atlanta: The metro area’s total tech jobs have bloomed by nearly 47 percent since 2010, nearly 20 percentage points above the national average.
4. Portland, Ore.: The tech community here is actually growing faster than its Silicon Valley counterpart, Forbes.com notes. Portland’s tech talent pool increased nearly 30 percent from 2010 to 2013, topping Silicon Valley’s nearly 10 percentage points.
5. Seattle: CBRE named it the nation’s third-best tech city in 2016. Tech employees continue to flock here. In Seattle, tech workers earn more than $110,000 per year, on average.
Source: “5 Cities Poised to Become Tomorrow’s Tech Meccas,” Forbes.com (March 23, 2017)
