When it comes to local economic growth, Tulsa doesn’t fare well in a new analysis.
Financial website WalletHub's rankings of 515 U.S. cities’ economic growth consider data on things like population, job and income growth, unemployment rates, even building permit activity.
"And, unfortunately, especially when it comes to large cities, Tulsa finds itself near the bottom of these rankings," said WalletHub analyst Jill Gonzalez.
Among the 64 cities with more than 300,000 residents, Tulsa ranked 55th, or 10th-slowest growing. Among all cities, it ranked 374th.
In all categories that factored into the rankings, Tulsa didn’t crack the top 100. The broader northeast Oklahoma region couldn’t help in this case.
"This is just city proper, no surrouding suburbs, et cetera. So, this is just going to be looking at the City of Tulsa," Gonzalez said.
Tulsa did have a No. 1 ranking for one indicator: per-capita gross domestic product growth, at more than 4.3 percent.
Wwhile some factors in WalletHub's analysis are influenced by personal decisions or market whims, cities can pursue policies to encourage growth.
"To hopefully spark new businesses and new entrepreneurs to come set up shop and, obviously, bring workers into the city, hopefully bring families into the city as well," Gonzalez said. "So, that's really how this growth can start."
Oklahoma City ranked 21 spots above Tulsa.
