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The 15 Hottest American Cities For 2015
In the past, young professionals clustered in the smaller satellite cities outside Atlanta, but recent gentrification and construction projects have lured them back to downtown Atlanta.
Similar to New York's High Line, the Atlanta BeltLine is a redevelopment project that's transforming an old railway track into a recreational path for cyclists and pedestrians. Piedmont Park has been revitalized as new constructions crop up around it.
Dozens of exciting restaurants opened in 2014 with even more expected for 2015.
Austin was named the best-performing city in the US this year by the Milken Institute.
The city came in second for future job growth, largely because of its burgeoning tech scene. Companies like Dell, National Instruments, and Flextronics are based here, and several startups have been coming out of the University of Texas.
All this has led to an influx of young professionals and recent college grads, which in turn has led to a boom in construction.
Burlington has always been known for its crunchy-granola vibe, but lately the city has been stepping up its game in leading the rest of the country in sustainability. The local food movement has been taking off here, with new culinary businesses that preach locally grown and made.
The city hosted its first local food festival in September, Eat by Northeast, where food justice nonprofits, farmers, food entrepreneurs, and foodies come together to feast and talk about all stages of local food, from farm to table. It's one of many steps the city is taking to continue to advance the local food movement.
Burlington is also leading the rest of Vermont in sustainable energy. The state plans to have renewable resources provide 90% of the energy for the state by 2050.
Tens of thousands of 25- to 34-year-olds, especially from Cambridge's Harvard and MIT, as well as the 100-plus colleges in nearby Boston, are drawn to Cambridge for the growing biotech industry.
Many of Cambridge's top employers, like the Novartis Institutes, Sanofi-Genzyme BioVentures, and Biogen Idec, pay well and have plenty of jobs available.
The area could get very crowded very quickly. A recent report by the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University created a fictional but fact-based projection of urban mobility in the greater Boston area for 2032, in which apartments become smaller (135 to 160 square feet) to fit more people, and the streets are full of self-driving bikes and cars that will moderate the increase in commuter traffic.
Since Colorado legalized marijuana and began allowing the sale of recreational marijuana use to anyone age 21 and over earlier this year, Denver has become a tourist destination for people who enjoy the drug. These weed tourists come to frequent the medicinal and recreational marijuana shops. Some tour companies, like My 420 Tours, cater to this crowd.
Since then, money has been pouring into the state in both tourism and tax revenue. And Colorado's marijuana shops continue to grow. The Mile High city now has 340 recreational and medicinal pot shops.
Crime is down, too, with the number of murders, sexual assaults, violent robberies, and other assaults falling by 5.6% in the first half of this year.
Other states are looking to Colorado and its capital to see how this law plays out.
Detroit has been slowly decaying over the past several years, but things are starting to look better for the Motor City.
The city has been trying to turn its economy around by attracting well-educated and talented workers.
But a group of young, motivated Detroiters have also been influential in turning the city around: They've been revitalizing the real-estate market, boosting tourism, and investing in local companies.
Certain industries have been growing strong in Detroit. The bike industry, for one, has been booming.
Between 2000 and 2012, Houston saw a 49% increase in the percentage of college graduates ages 25 to 34, according to a recent report by City Observatory. The rate of young, college-educated people moving to Houston is increasing faster here than anywhere else in the country.
That probably has to do with Houston being the biggest job-creating city in the US. More Fortune 500 companies are headquartered there than anywhere else — especially oil and energy industry companies.
And with jobs in the oil sector comes an increase in production. The Greater Houston Partnership projects that the number of barrels of crude oil will reach 9.5 million in 2015, up from 8.7 million as of September 2014.
With barely a quarter million people, Madison is undergoing a restructuring of its skyline. Development projects this year in Madison are worth $337 million, of which almost two-thirds is for large apartment buildings.
The massive facelift will make room for a host of 20- and 30-somethings who are moving into the downtown area.
Madison was named the best place to live in 2014 by Livability, and a big reason for that is the plethora of new jobs luring in young professionals.
Even more towering development projects are proposed for the next few years, challenging zoning and building laws. Some people are embracing the shift toward a city that welcomes growth while others are calling it into question. "You wonder if Madison could slip from under-built to over-built if the apartment boom continues," Madison Urban Design Commission member Tom DeChant told The Cap Times.
In May, the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce was awarded the president's "E" Star Award for Export Services — the highest awarded recognition for export expansion in the US.
International trade is one of the biggest job creators in Mobile, which is home to the ninth-largest port in the country, and the city's Gulf Coast location puts it in the perfect spot for interaction with Central and South America.
The coal trade is especially booming. Walter Energy, an Alabama-based coal producer and exporter, is planning to expand its coal export operations at Mobile's McDuffie Coal Terminal, according to AL.com, which will result in an additional 6.5 million tons of coal being transported through the Port of Mobile.
Nashville may be known for its country-music scene, but these days the Southern city is much more than just a music town.
It's becoming a focal point for the auto and healthcare industries. The area is home to more than 300 healthcare companies and has more than 30,000 jobs in the auto industry.
The popularity of the TV show "Nashville" has helped boost tourism. Nashville saw 11.8 million visitors in 2013, and the Nashville Convention & Visitors Bureau is predicting a 10% increase in the number of visitors by 2016.
All of this makes the city for attractive to newcomers: Nashville is the second most popular city for young people who recently graduated from college.
So many hipsters have been moving out of San Francisco and into Oakland that The New York Times recently dubbed it "Brooklyn by the Bay."
There are tons of vegan restaurants, coffee shops, and trendy clothing stores. All these place strong emphasis on local and vintage, surefire signs of hipsterdom.
Temescal Alley, filled with barber shops, doughnut stores, and a local farmers market, is a hipster hotspot.
This trend will continue as San Francisco real-estate prices continue to rise and push more young people to Oakland.
Pittsburgh, aka Steel City, is seeing a huge boom in the oil industry as oil companies buy up shale gas producers and draw well-educated, and well-paid, engineers to the city. Its housing market was relatively unaffected by the recession, but now prices could increase thanks to an uptick in affluence in the city.
Tech companies — like Google, for example — are also establishing themselves in up-and-coming Pittsburgh neighborhoods like Bakery Square and East Liberty. This has made the area more attractive for cool bars and restaurants that cater to the kinds of people to work in startup jobs.
Over the past decade, Manhattan real estate has gotten so expensive that everyone in New York moved to Brooklyn. But now Brooklyn has gotten very expensive, which means that people are fleeing to Queens, where real-estate prices are still relatively inexpensive.
New York City's most diverse borough is also one of the world's greatest places for food. Head to Flushing for Chinese, Astoria for Greek, or Jackson Heights for Indian. Chef and TV personality Andrew Zimmern told us that Queens is the best food city in the world.
It's also got plenty of great culture, with the Queens Museum, MoMA PS 1, and the Socrates Sculpture Park.
The four miles between Venice and Santa Monica has been dubbed "Silicon Beach" for its growing number of startups that started moving into the area to escape the rising rents and cutthroat competition in Silicon Valley.
The growth has been so exponential that many startups have already started to move inland because of overcrowding and inflated prices of office and residential spaces.
These startups are moving to lesser-known but hip areas like Marina del Rey to find converted warehouses to start their businesses, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
D.C., which has always been known for notoriously bad traffic and a headache-worthy public transit system is getting an overhaul in infrastructure. The Silver Line, a new Metro line the city had been anticipating for the last few years, finally opened Phase 1 in July; it reaches out to Reston, Virginia, where many commuters live.
Phase 1 will clear up a good amount of the car congestion, but it will also give the economy a boost. The Silver Line's Tysons Corner station is the site of a large shopping mall, which is now easily accessible and bound to see an influx in money-spending shoppers.
Phase 2 is anticipated to arrive in 2018, and will connect the capital to Dulles International Airport.
40 Under 40: People To Watch in 2015 »
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