2. Austin, Texas
Austonites tend to be smug, but they have good reason. The central Texas city ranked as the No. 1 large urban area for jobs in the last Forbes survey. Along with Raleigh-Durham, Austin is an emerging challenger for high-tech supremacy with Silicon Valley. The current area’s population is 1.7 million and is expected to grow rapidly in the coming decades. Austin owes much both to its public sector institutions (the state government and the main Campus of the University of Texas) and its expanding ranks of private companies–including foreign ones–swarming into the city’s surrounding suburban belt.
