MarketWatch survey: Tucson near bottom of best business cities
Staff and wire reports
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 12.18.2009

Tucson has the dubious distinction of being ranked in the bottom 10 in MarketWatch's annual survey of the best cities for business.
It ranked 95th out of the 101 cities in the survey results released Thursday.
Here's what MarketWatch wrote:
"Arizona's "second city" suffers from a number of ills, not the least of which is that most businesses that set up shop in the state end up in Phoenix.
"The city has no Fortune 1000 companies, and because it was the largest city with no firms in that category, it ranks dead last on that list.
"Tucson also hosts no Forbes Private Companies, no S&P 500 firms and two Russell 2000 companies. It ranks 10th worst in the total number of companies, as measured by the Census Bureau.
"But the region also is home to extensive military and Pentagon contracting work, which doesn't show up in those numbers.
"Tucson was in the upper half in managing unemployment and its GDP during the decade, and in the top fifth in population growth.
"Still, the last year was a tough one for Tucson, as the region was seventh worst in jobs lost during the recession."
The loss of construction jobs here, in particular, has amplified the need for a more "recession-proof" economy, responded Laura Shaw, senior vice president of Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities.
"That's why TREO developed the Blueprint, to diversify our economy beyond our normal growth drivers of construction and tourism," Shaw said in an e-mail Thursday.
But she added, "It's unfortunate that some of the region's primary, export-related, and/or largest employers — Raytheon, for example, and a number of aerospace and defense companies — don't even show up here, when they contribute millions to our economy. In fact, Business Facilities magazine named Tucson earlier this year No. 6 on its list of the top 10 metro areas for aerospace/defense manufacturing."
This is the third year in a row for Tucson to be ranked in MarketWatch's bottom 10. Last year, a big reason cited by MarketWatch was the bursting of the Sun Belt real estate bubble.
Until this year, Tucson was the smallest of the 50 metro areas surveyed, leading local leaders to say it was getting a raw deal, MarketWatch noted.
But this year, MarketWatch expanded its search for the best city for business to include any metro area with 500,000 people or more, doubling its search.
As a result, seven cities that weren't included in last year's survey made the bottom 10.
And this year a city smaller than Tucson — Des Moines, Iowa, population 556,230 — handily beat all comers to be named best for business.
Reporter Russ Britt of MarketWatch contributed to this report.
75 Comments on this story