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Downtown Population Growth In Southwest And Mountain West Metros, Peter Grema, Eshaan Vakil, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Demography

Summarizing data from Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program’s May 2020 research brief “big city downtowns are booming, but can their momentum outlast the coronavirus?,” this fact sheet includes an overview of population growth in downtown and metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) between 1980 and 2018 in the Southwest and Mountain West regions of the United States. We focus on Mountain West states (Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico) in our analysis. In addition, we include the metros that comprise the Southwest Megapolitan Triangle (Southern California, alongside Las Vegas, NV, and Phoenix, AZ metropolitan statistical areas).

Income Inequality In Nevada And The Southwest Megapolitan Triangle, Yanneli Llamas, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown

Economic Development & Workforce

This Fact Sheet highlights income inequality in Nevada at both the county and metropolitan level. The Tables that follow report disparities in income across 16 Nevada counties, as well as 9 metropolitan areas in the state, as identified by the Economic Policy Institute. To offer a complete comparison, we also present income disparities between the components of the Southwest Megapolitan Triangle: Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise, NV; Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA; and Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, AZ.

Mountain Monitor-2nd Quarter 2012, Mark Muro, Kenan Fikri

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

Data for the second quarter of 2012 reveal that the large metropolitan areas of the Mountain region were undergoing some of both the strongest and weakest economic recoveries in the nation—even as the pace of recovery across the region as a whole slackened. The result is a new geography. Crash-blasted Boise and Phoenix, along with Utah’s metropolitan areas, are now recovering relatively strongly while Colorado’s metropolitan areas and Albuquerque, Las Vegas, and Tucson struggle.

Mountain Monitor-1st Quarter 2012, Mark Muro, Kenan Fikri

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

For three years now the Mountain Monitor — Brookings Mountain West’s Mountain Zone variant of Brookings’ MetroMonitor — has been tracking the region’s protracted, in-most-places anemic, economic recovery. Quarter-to-quarter, the Monitor has reported on a slow healing of the region’s metropolitan economies that has differed starkly from the region’s past boom-bust cycles.

Mountain Monitor-4th Quarter 2011, Mark Muro, Kenan Fikri

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

Recovery was firmly underway in the Intermountain West by the fourth quarter of 2011 but its pace varied considerably across the region’s 10 major metropolitan areas. Six of the 10 metros saw job growth in the fourth quarter but only four saw it accelerate over the previous one. Output grew everywhere but only in half of the region’s metros did the pace of growth quicken. The unemployment rate was down across the board from one year earlier. House prices in most markets stabilized. Yet signs of a robust, sustained, and self-fueling recovery remained elusive.

National economic indicators from early 2012 …

Mountain Monitor-3rd Quarter 2011, Mark Muro, Kenan Fikri

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

Economic recovery in the Intermountain West’s major metropolitan areas edged forward in the third quarter of 2011, after idling for much of the year. Nationally, high technology and automotive-oriented metros showed the strongest signs of recovery; in the Intermountain West, manufacturing-intensive and technology-oriented metros had the strongest quarter. Employment and output grew in most metropolitan areas, and the unemployment rate fell throughout the region. At the same time, the housing market freefall came to an end—or at least paused—across most of the region, as home prices ticked upwards for the first time since the Monitor began tracking recession and recovery. …

Unify, Regionalize, Diversify: An Economic Development Agenda For Nevada, Mark Muro

Brookings Mountain West Publications

Nevada stands at a crossroads, yet it appears ready to remap its future.

Silver Staters sense that the current economic slump has not been just a temporary reversal but a challenge to the state’s traditional growth model—one that has revealed an economy over-dependent on consumption sectors, prone to booms and busts, and too little invested in innovation and economic diversification. And yet, for all that Nevadans have been early to recognize that the current slump will beget, in some places, innovation and renewal, and in other places erosion—and so requires action.

To that end, this report draws on an intense …

Mountain Monitor-2nd Quarter 2011, Mark Muro, Kenan Fikri

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

Data through the second quarter of 2011 raise new questions about the pace and certainty of recovery in the Intermountain West. Even places like Denver, Colorado Springs, and Ogden—which only suffered mild setbacks in the early quarters of the recession—have stagnated in the wake of the nation’s worst economic slump since the Great Depression. Output and employment increased hesitantly in eight of the 10 major metros of the Intermountain West in the second quarter while the housing market slumped to new lows everywhere.