Yeah I have been seeing* some doomsaying writing about how even the SF Bay Area, messed up as it is in so many ways, has outperformed LA economically. Ever since the Cold War and increasingly lately. Much is made by these journalists and academics of LA's struggles, I guess.
But still, guess what? While nobody's going to match Silicon Valley in a percentage growth contest this decade, LA comes out ahead in overall GDP growth 2001-2016. Here are chained-dollar figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis:
255.99 billion/yr added in NYC-Newark-Westchester
251.37 bil/yr added by LA-Anaheim (no Inland Empire, no Ventura) **
221.46 bil/yr added in SFO+SValley
164.33 bil/yr added in DFW
154.36 bil/yr added in Hou-Galveston
118.27 bil/yr added in DC-NoVA-MD
89.11 bil/yr added in Boston (96.22 when Manchester-Nashua included)
80.96 bil/yr added in Philly-Wilmington
67.66 bil/yr added in Metro Atlanta
66.75 bil/yr added by Chicagoland
Doing a top-ten list of gainer MSAs would have to separate SF and SV, bumping Chicago from the list, but here I've grouped the two together for comparison to LA --- and LA almost beat NYC, which people think is going strong. New figures will come out on Tuesday, covering 2017. I will be keen to see if it's lapped NY performance after all.
The LA growth is really quite impressive because it is added in the existing metro footprint. While harder to find stats about than census MSA, the UA (Urbanized Area) of 1,668 square miles called "Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana" now is home to at least 12.7 million Californians, up from 11.8 million in Census 2000.
Imagine if in 2000 we'd already had 11.8 million Texans in this shaded region of 1668 square miles:
Metroplex 1668sqmi like LA-LB UA.png
* such as
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=22080and
https://calmatters.org/articles/tale-tw ... south-now/** that is, the MSA's estimated real GDP kept in chained 2009 dollars was 251.37 billion higher annually in 2016 ($885 billion) than back in 2001 ($633 billion)
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