America’s fastest growing metropolitan areas

By Brian Wingfield and William Pentland

updated 6:43 p.m. ET Feb. 7, 2008

It's no secret that the Southeast and Western United States are booming. The costs of living and doing business there are often cheaper there than in big coastal cities. But where and how much those cities are thriving might surprise you.

Take Alabama. The state has some of the fastest growing metro areas in the country, including Mobile, which is projected to have the greatest change in "gross metropolitan product (GMP)," 34 percent between 2007-2012, according to research forecasts done for us by Moody's Economy.com.

One boon to Alabama is ThyssenKrupp's announcement last year to build a $3.7 billion steel plant in Mobile. And Huntsville — expected GMP growth 15 percent by 2012 — has long been a hub for defense and space research. Since the mid-1990s, Alabama has also become a manufacturing center for automakers like DaimlerChrysler, Toyota and Hyundai.

"The automotive industry has been Alabama's real growth industry in the last 15 years," says Brian Hilson, president and CEO of Huntsville's chamber of commerce.

Other metro areas, like Port St. Lucie and Palm Bay, are part of a growing biotech cluster in central Florida. Straddling Texas and Arkansas, Texarkana is seeing war-related development: Its Red River Army Depot is a major maintenance and storage facility for military equipment. And St. George, Utah, located about 120 miles from Las Vegas, has boomed in recent years as a destination for retirees.

Fastest growing Large metropolitan areas 1. Austin, Texas 2. Cape Coral-Ft. Meyers, Fla. The list Small metropolitian areas 1. Mobile, Ala. 2. Texarkana, Tex./Ark. The list

All of them sit at or near the top of Forbes' list of America's fastest-growing metropolitan areas, places large and small that offer at least the promise of booming economies for years to come.

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To compile our list, we looked at all of the country's 363 metropolitan areas, defined by the U.S. Census Bureau has a geographic region with a "core urban area" of at least 50,000 people. Because many small metro areas are high growth — and because we wanted to show growth in large cities as well — we split the group into two classes: the largest 100 metro areas (with at least 528,000 people) and everyone else. We use projections run for us by Moody's Economy.com to show growth in GMP between 2007-2012.

Of course, if one looks at economic growth in the country's largest 100 metros, the usual suspects jump to the top of the list. With an estimated 32 percent GMP growth from 2007-2012, Austin, Texas, is the winner for big metros. Atlanta, Seattle, Orlando, Houston and San Jose, Calif., also appear high on the list. What do they all have in common? They're tech hubs with proximity to universities and a healthy increase in population. Austin's population, for example, is expected to increase by nearly 15 percent by 2012, according to Moody's Economy.com forecasts.

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