Rising Midwestern Cities to Put on Your Watch List

With their promise of affordable housing and low cost of living, new real estate superstars such as Dayton, Ohio, are putting the Midwest on homebuyers' radars. While not every Midwestern city will make the top ten U.S. hot market lists, some cities that have become local economic centers are on the cusp of greatness. Only time will tell, however, if these towns are boom or bust. Find out if your city is a rising star.

America has many cities that are booming and others that are in severe distress. These two groups get the most public attention.

But what about cities between those two extremes—cities that are doing above average economically and demographically but not yet at the superstar level? This paper focuses on 10 such cities in the greater Midwest.

While the “Rust Belt” accounts for the lion’s share of America’s highly distressed cities, the image that this entire region is uniformly failing is not the whole story. There are well-performing cities in the Midwest that are growing in population and jobs faster than the U.S. average and have high-value economic sectors, civic assets, and amenities. They could potentially raise their performance to be more comparable with Sunbelt boomtowns.

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