Texas Leads STEM Growth Patterns and Jobs Potential

HOUSTON – (Realty News Report) – Three Texas cities – Houston, Austin and Dallas – rank in the top 20 in a new index evaluating STEM job growth trends across the country.

RCLCO Real Estate Consulting, in a study producing its STEMdex, said the ten cities topping the list this year are Denver, Seattle, Austin, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., San Jose, Raleigh, Boston, Portland, and Salt Lake City.

The study, covering the the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States, identified the strongholds of STEM (aka Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) as well as the cities that show future potential for attracting the STEM-related jobs.

Austin ranked No. 3. Dallas was No. 11 and Houston was No. 20.

Austin was recently selected as the new headquarters of Tesla, which is relocating out of California. (Tesla’s stock surged 12.7 percent to a record-high of $1024 Monday, making the company worth over $1 trillion. Telsa CEO Elon Musk’s personal net worth hit $289 billion.) Tesla is building a 4 million SF factory in east Austin.

Oracle moved its HQ to Austin last year and a 35-story office tower, which will be fully occupied by Google, Is under construction in downtown Austin.

Houston polished its tech reputation with the recent announcement that Hewlett Packard Enterprise is moving its HQ from California to Houston. HPE will be located in the City Place development, which was formerly known as Springwoods Village. (New HPE headquarters being developed by Patrinely Group.)

Texas and California are the only states with three cities in the top 20 of the STEMdex, which was published annually in partnership with office investment management firm CapRidge Partners.

“While it remains far too early to fully assess how the COVID-19 pandemic and any current or future variants will continue to impact our daily lives, another year of data has given us increased confidence in the growth prospects for STEM jobs, particularly in the regions highlighted by the 2021 STEMdex,” said Gregg Logan, Managing Director of RCLCO. In the latest 10-year industry employment projections released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (published in September 2021 with projections through 2030), higher than average employment growth, particularly for STEM jobs, are forecast.

RCLCO partnered with CapRidge Partners in 2016 to create the STEMdex as a tool to identify which of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States are primed for growth in STEM-based industries. The analysis focuses on metrics in four major areas RCLCO finds to be paramount to the growth of STEM jobs: STEM Trends/Economic Factors (including population growth metrics, industry-specific growth and location quotient metrics, and STEM wages), Workforce Quality (including the growth of millennial households and educational attainment levels), Quality of Life/Health (including cost of living factors, commute times, walk scores, and more), and Business Climate (including office costs, local tax environments, and other metrics). In total, RCLCO identified and weighted 24 different indicators they believe best characterize the four major categories and can quantify their impact on the STEM job market.

For more about Texas real estate, check out the book Houston 2020: America’s Boom Town – An Extreme Close Up by Ralph Bivins. Available on Amazon http://tiny.cc/4a2g6y

Houston 2020 Ebook version https://tinyurl.com/4xm7z8b5

File: Texas Leads STEM Growth Patterns

File: RCLCO. STEM jobs. Texas Leads STEM Growth Patterns. CapRidge Partners. Austin. Google, Tesla

Caption:Trammell Crow, in a JV with the Michael Dell organization, is developing a 35-story office tower in downtown Austin overlooking Lady Bird Lake. The 719,000-SF building was designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli.