By Hannah Lang and Kim Mackrael | Photographs by Kim Raff for The Wall Street Journal
Salt Lake City has top-notch ski resorts, challenging bike trails and breathtaking views of the Wasatch Mountains. It also is home to the hottest job market in the U.S.
As the pandemic raged through the U.S. in 2020, no metropolitan area in the country expanded the size of its labor force more on a percentage basis than Utah's capital. It also had the lowest average unemployment rate and the highest share of people working or looking for jobs. These signs of strength helped it rank first among 53 large metro areas in an annual examination of U.S. labor markets conducted by The Wall Street Journal, after ranking No. 4 in 2019.
Other cities that emerged as beacons to job seekers and businesses during the pandemic were, like Salt Lake City, located far from the coasts. Hubs in the Southwest and Midwest such as Austin, Denver, Indianapolis and Kansas City minimized employment losses, kept unemployment relatively low and retained and attracted workers in a year when the U.S. lost more than 9 million jobs.
Some benefited from technology jobs that became even more critical during a time of isolation for many Americans, while others relied on older corners of the economy that were also in high demand. Workers gravitated to these places due to the job opportunities, lower costs and a quieter lifestyle that appealed to some migrants from bigger population centers who were now allowed to work remotely.
The losers were tourist hot spots such as Las Vegas or densely-populated cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago that lost workers as the coronavirus spread. Even once-hot tech hubs of San Francisco, Raleigh, N.C., and Boston suffered declines. Some of these laggards were more aggressive with their business lockdowns, allowing rival metros with fewer restrictions and lower costs to capitalize on the chaos.
Whether these changes are temporary or lasting is too soon to know. Some cities that lost a lot of jobs in 2020 likely rebounded with more robust hiring in March, according to a Labor Department report from early April that showed strong national job gains in restaurants, bars, entertainment and hotels. Forecasters surveyed by The Wall Street Journal project about 6 million jobs to be added across the U.S. in the next 12 months, which would be the best such stretch of job creation on records back to the 1940s.
Some expect the top performers in 2020 to consolidate their gains. "Coming out of the pandemic, and out of this recession, their edge is probably only going to get larger," said Moody's Analytics economist Adam Kamins. Moody's Analytics provided data for The Wall Street Journal's rankings.
The 'silicon slopes'
To determine the strongest job market in the country, the Journal assessed regions with more than 1 million residents on five labor market indicators: the average unemployment rate, the labor-force participation rate, the change in payrolls, weekly wages and the percentage increase in the size of the workforce.
Salt Lake City rose to the top thanks to fewer business shutdowns, more moderate health consequences from Covid-19 and a young and well-educated population that supported a tech sector that was already on fire before the pandemic began. Research from the University of Utah found that the state's tech industry's job growth averaged 3.6% a year between 2007 and 2017, more than double the national pace during the same period.
The region spanning the neighboring cities of Provo and Salt Lake City had so much momentum over the last decade that it acquired the nickname "Silicon Slopes." Provo's labor market ranked No. 17 last year among 328 smaller metro areas with fewer than 1 million residents, according to the Journal's analysis. Another area north of Salt Lake City, Ogden, was No. 1 among the smaller metros.
"We went into the pandemic well-positioned," said Natalie Gochnour, associate dean at the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business.
Salt Lake City wasn't immune from the spread of Covid-19, but it was able to avoid multiple shutdowns that crippled other cities. It did so partly because of a shared local effort to keep businesses open. The local chamber of commerce and state health department partnered on a campaign where participating local companies committed to having their employees maintain distance from others, wear masks and stay home when they are sick.
Utah and other states with fewer business restrictions tended to have less dramatic increases in unemployment last year, according to Labor Department data, though many states with looser Covid-19 restrictions had higher case counts and more deaths. It was a difficult balancing act for government officials who had to consider their economies while also protecting their populations.
Utah was able to achieve that balance largely because of the resilience of its population. It ranked fourth among states for Covid-19 cases as a share of the population, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University, yet the state had among the fewest deaths per 1,000 residents through April 7. One possible factor in that result, according to Ms. Gochnour, was the area's young population. Utah has the youngest median age of any state, according to the Census Bureau. Children and young adults die from Covid-19 at far lower rates.
By early 2021, employment in business services and information was close to year-earlier levels in Salt Lake City, according to the Labor Department. Those tend to be better paying, higher-tech jobs. Employment in finance was already 4.4% above pre pandemic levels in February, the latest available data. Leslie Hackett, who owns two Express Employment Professionals staffing offices in the Salt Lake City area, said she is only able to immediately fill about half of the requests for placements because it is so difficult to find enough workers.
"We're finding that when unemployment is this low, we have to recruit working people away from another job to come to us," Ms. Hackett said.
Seeking new opportunity
The optimistic employment picture in Salt Lake City was part of the attraction for newcomers Romina Boccia and her husband Grice Mulligan, who traded a 90-minute commute in East Coast traffic for a home office with a view of the Wasatch Mountains. For Ms. Boccia, 36-years old, the coronavirus served as a moment to reflect, and reset goals. "If we were going to be stuck in a place for sometime, we'd rather be stuck in Utah, " she said.
The decision was about more than the views, however. Ms. Boccia landed an event programming job that allowed her to work remotely and Mr. Mulligan, 53, found he could easily shift his startup ambitions out west. They had lived in the Washington, D.C., area for 15 years. She worked as an economist for a think tank and he oversaw software projects for government organizations.
"It appears to be exceptionally friendly to business here," Mr. Mulligan said. His company, Pubtelly LLC, sells software to sports bars and similar establishments to manage content playing on their TVs. The Salt Lake area has a healthy mix of growing startups and well-established companies, he said, plus a strong local university network that serves as a pipeline for younger talent.
If his current venture doesn't pan out, Mr. Mulligan said he would be happy to stay in the Salt Lake area, either working for a local company or launching another business. "I don't see a challenge with either going to work for someone else, or forming a company with others," he said.
Another newcomer drawn to the region's job market was Christine Spring, 55, who moved to Salt Lake City last October after retiring from her teaching job in Muskegon, Mich. Ms. Spring said she picked Salt Lake City because she thought it would be a good place to start a new career and she wanted to be closer to her two adult children -- both of whom had moved to the area in previous years for work.
"It's such a huge job market, I felt like it was kind of a wide open field," she said, adding that job offers came much faster than she expected.
Within a week of her arrival in Salt Lake City, Ms. Spring had a temporary position through Express Employment as a receptionist in the Utah governor's office. She was offered two permanent jobs in the weeks that followed, which she turned down, and became a permanent employee in the governor's office in February.
One local company that added more workers during 2020 was mattress maker Purple Innovation Inc. It hired 1,200 employees in the past year, more than doubling its staff, and is looking to add more. Most of Purple's new jobs were manufacturing positions at the company's suburban Salt Lake City production facility. They also included marketing, tech and finance jobs at Purple's corporate headquarters in Lehi, Utah, just south of Salt Lake City.
There is "a lot of freedom and a lot of business-friendly policies that make it easy for companies to come in and to thrive," said Mark Brown, vice president of human resources at Purple, who also cited the strength of the local universities and lower labor and building costs relative to coastal cities. "You just can't go anywhere in the state where there's not just substantial growth, both residential and commercial."
Making it work in Indianapolis
America's other hot job markets, such as Austin and Denver, benefited from the migration of high-wage jobs, particularly in tech and finance, and their lower costs when compared with bigger population centers such as New York or San Francisco.
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04-09-21 0544ET
