When Brett Good travels for work, he often strikes up conversations with people over dinner. “It’s rare to meet someone who’s actually from [Phoenix or Las Vegas] or wherever I am. Most of the time the person is from somewhere else.” As the senior district president overseeing Southern California, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona for the staffing firm Robert Half, Good has a front-row seat to the job growth happening in the interior Western states that’s bringing newcomers along with it.
Nevada, Utah, and Idaho, in that order, added jobs faster than anywhere else over the last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Following close behind are Washington and Arizona, creating a corridor of job growth that runs straight through the Interior West.
Many point to big tech firms like Amazon and Google as the drivers of new jobs in coastal states, but when it comes to the interior, reasons for growth are a little more complicated, experts say. For one, those huge companies — coupled with insufficient housing in West Coast cities — are pushing some folks to interior metros that are among the fastest growing in the country.
Take Boise. Josh Warborg, who oversees Washington and Idaho for Robert Half, sees a distinct difference between the people moving to Washington and those moving to Idaho.
“People are moving to Seattle because of the tech growth, and largely they’re moving with a job in hand,” he said. “But people are moving to Boise strictly as a quality-of-life choice.” Indeed, of the 71,000 people who migrated to Idaho in 2017, nearly half came from the far more expensive states of Washington, Oregon, and California, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Of course, people won’t move to a city just because it’s cheaper — there needs to be work available, too. And smart companies are seeing the opportunities of new workforces in these states and setting up shop, Good says. In Phoenix, for example, American Express, Wells Fargo, and Union Bank added some of Arizona’s 66,000 new jobs.
“If you’re recruiting to Seattle and the Bay Area, it sounds great on the phone, but then they come out and see the cost of living and housing there, and decide they’re not going to relocate,” said Good. “Companies are compelled to look at other areas where they can still attract great talent.”
And while varied industries from manufacturing and construction to professional and business services are all driving growth in these states, some are looking to capitalize on their own versions of the tech boom, with Utah leading the charge. The once-sleepy suburbs between Salt Lake City and Provo, such as Lehi and American Fork, now are home to outposts of Silicon Valley giants like Adobe and locally grown companies such as Domo. Information jobs grew 6 percent year-over-year in Utah, its fastest-growing sector. As it’s gotten more difficult to attract and find talent to fill all the open roles in Silicon Valley and Seattle, other areas are making their move.
“If you’re a young graduate with IT or math skills, sure, you could go to San Francisco and make $150,000 a year and share a flat with three other people,” Good said. “Or you could go to Lehi and make a little less, but buy a home and go skiing on the weekends.”
Then of course, there are the ways these states are attracting businesses and people alike. Nevada, which added 3.4 percent more jobs and 2.1 percent more people from March 2018 to March 2019 — both highest in the nation — can chalk up its success to a few factors. Christopher Robison, a labor economist for the state, says Nevada has taken significant steps to attract growth since the dark days of the Great Recession. “We were one of the hardest hit states in the country,” he said. “Over the last decade, we had quite the available workforce, lots of unemployment, and cheap labor.”
The state also has one of the most business-friendly tax structures in the nation, forgoing both individual and corporate income taxes. And when Tesla decided to build its famous Gigafactory a 30-minute drive from Reno, in 2014, the deal was sweetened with $1.3 billion in tax breaks and incentives the state offered Elon Musk’s company.
All the states in this Western growth corridor exhibit lessons learned from the Recession. The major one? Diversification. Nevada is a prime example. “Historically speaking, Nevada’s main industries — leisure, hospitality, and gambling — tended to stay strong or even increase during bad economic times, but the last recession demonstrated that wasn’t always the case,” Robison said. Twenty years ago, those three industries made up 60 percent of the state’s economy. Today, the state has switched things up, so they make up about 40 percent of the economy, Robison said. The growth of other sectors is thanks in large part to companies like Tesla and Amazon, which will open a massive new fulfillment center in North Las Vegas this year, its sixth in the state. And construction jobs, due in part to the new factories, are up 14 percent in Nevada, while manufacturing jobs are up 10 percent.
As the economies of the Interior West continue to grow, more and more people will start to weigh their options, says Good.
“Does it make sense to stay in a high cost of living, high property-tax state, or relocate somewhere more favorable?” he asked. “You know what they say: ‘Build it and they will come.’”
