Real Estate Investment Nose: America's High-Tech Innovation Hubs Coming to You From Some Surprisingly Remote Towns

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Start-up tech cities

It’s worth checking out this map and article from Richard Florida over at The Atlantic Cities so you can see how growth in high-tech start up firms — places where brains and brawn will come together and create jobs — is no longer taking place in the north or northeast. And not so much either on the west coast. Our tech queen Austin is on the map, but not as big a blotch as Fort Collins. Places like Fort Collins, Colorado, Cheyenne, Wyoming, Salt Lake City, Utah, or Corvallis, Oregon are surpassing blockbuster hubs like San Jose, Cambridge or Seattle.

New York City? Yes, there is a burgeoning tech community in Brooklyn just across the East River, but folks there are feeling pinched by high cost of living and taxes, taxes, taxes.

Here’s how they ‘splain it:

“The report defines the high-tech sector as industries with a high share of jobs in science, technology, engineering and math using data from the National Establishment Time Series for 2010. Based on this, Hathaway measured the density of high-tech start-ups across 384 U.S. metros by their location quotient, a conventional urban metric that chart’s how a city compares to the national average, set at 1. Hathaway found that 78 metro areas had LQs greater than 1, meaning their start-up density was greater than that of the U.S. as a whole. The top 25 metros for high-tech start-up density accounted for 19 percent of all new high-tech firms across the country between 1990 and 2010, signaling just how important the tech scene has become to some small metros.”

What does this mean? Following our real estate noses, these may well be places where great real estate investment opportunity awaits.

Oh, and what can we do to get Texas bigger blotches on that map?

Top Metros for High-Tech Density (2010)
Rank Metro Area Density
1 Boulder, CO 6.3
2 Fort Collins-Loveland, CO 3.0
3 San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA 2.6
4 Cambridge-Newton-Framingham, CA 2.4
4 Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, WA 2.4
4 Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, CO 2.4
4 San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, CA 2.4
8 Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 2.3
8 Colorado Springs, CO 2.3
10 Cheyenne, WY 2.0
10 Salt Lake City, UT 2.0
10 Corvallis, OR 2.0

 

Candy Evans, founder and publisher of CandysDirt.com, is one of the nation’s leading real estate reporters.

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