Seattle Times business columnist Jon Talton may have the best lede for this report.
Take heart, ye boom fatigued. Seattle fell out of the top 10 of the latest Best Performing Cities report from the Milken Institute.
Most of the state can only aspire to the days of being boom fatigued. And, for Seattle, coming in 11th may be a slight ego blow, but it’s neither a bad ranking nor a (necessarily) foreshadowing of decline. Here’s a snapshot of Milken’s take on things.
Even though the metro climbed from fifth to fourth place for high-tech GDP concentration, other cities with less established tech clusters have grown more quickly.
Meanwhile, high-wage jobs are driving retail spending. In 2013, taxable retail sales increased by 7 percent in King County and by 8 percent in Snohomish County.33 Jobs are being created in both high-skill and lower-skill service industries—the professional, scientific, and technical services sector and the food services and drinking places sector each added more than 5,000 jobs in 2013.
If we were to worry about things, we might include concerns about how rising labor costs in the lower skill service industries will impact hiring, automation, and shift business practices.
