Forbes ranks Portland 'Best Places for Business and Careers' in the country

The view of Portland's skyline from Mt. Tabor. (Stephanie Yao Long/The Oregonian)

Look around. Are you in Portland? Are you in the bathroom or at a meeting or on a conference call, reading this article from a computer or device while technically "at work"? If so, you could be part of the reason for the latest superlative bestowed upon Stumptown.

On Tuesday, Forbes released their list of "The Best Places for Business and Careers 2017" and at the top of that list? Duh. Portland.

According to Forbes, what's bad for traffic is actually great for the city.

"The influx of educated young adults has been a boon to the $157 billion economy, with household incomes up 4 percent annually since 2011 and unemployment falling below 4 percent from a peak of 11.3 percent in 2009," Forbes writes. "Portland now has the ninth-highest concentration of highly educated millennials based on data from Experian."

But it isn't just waves of brilliant millennials that Forbes is basing their ranking on. The magazine cited "companies with a large local presence in the Portland metro like Nike, Intel, Daimler and Boeing," and the burgeoning tech and startup community, which they call "Silicon Forest," a name I think we can all agree hasn't really caught on.

One thing some Portlanders might take issue with, even though it's 100 percent true? "Companies and workers in Portland benefit from dramatically more affordable conditions than in the Bay Area," according to Forbes.

The magazine said they created their list by comparing "the business climates of the 200 largest metro areas by population in the U.S."

They rated those metro areas "on 14 metrics related to job growth, costs (business and living), income growth, quality of life and the education of the labor force."

One of the best things about this list? Seattle, a city with which we should have a much more robust rivalry, only made it to third on this list. You hear that Amazon?

-- Lizzy Acker

503-221-8052
lacker@oregonian.com, @lizzzyacker

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