Hot Towns

November in New York City has its charms. Ice skaters twirl in Central Park, Santa sets up shop at Radio City and department stores unfurl their holiday finery. But to Delia Everett, November meant a chilly wait for the 6:45 a.m. bus to her Manhattan job as an executive assistant. To her husband Jim, who had lost his job as a steam fitter, it meant fixing heaters and patching plumbing in their Mahwah, N.J., apartment building, where he worked as assistant super to cover the rent. To their two children, it meant gray afternoons watching TV in their two-bedroom, ground-floor apartment.

November on Florida's Gulf Coast makes a much different postcard. Newly planted palm trees line swaths of land buzzing with the construction of one business complex after another. In a spiffy new housing development, the Everetts relax under the vaulted ceilings of their living room, gazing out through glass doors at their pool and hot tub overlooking a lake. A year ago, Delia's employer, magazine distributor Source Interlink, decided to consolidate its several big-city offices and relocate to Bonita Springs, Fla. (pop. 32,800), a fast-sprouting town on the booming stretch of coastline between Fort Myers and Naples. The company offered jobs to both Everetts--Delia, 42, as assistant to the CEO, and Jim, 43, as office-services manager. It took the family one visit to decide. Delia, who had lived in apartments in the New York City area all her life, still looks a little stunned. "I can't believe," she says, "the life we have here."

While the great migration from Rust Belt cities to such Sun Belt giants as Phoenix and Houston has been under way for years, what's new is that the hottest places in America to find jobs are small and midsize towns, and not all of them are in the warmer latitudes. Burgs ranging from Fargo, N.D., to Fayetteville, Ark., to Reno, Nev., are leading the U.S. in job gains. The Milken Institute, a private think tank, found in its annual ranking of cities with the most job growth that 11 of the top 20 had populations well under 1 million. The Fort Myers region (pop. 420,000) added 17,500 new jobs between July 2000 and July 2003; the Fayetteville area (pop. 320,000) added 16,300. "That might seem surprising to some," says Ross DeVol, author of the study, but many smaller regions share characteristics that act as job magnets: lower costs, tax breaks for employers, funding for entrepreneurs and a deepening pool of skilled and educated workers. Many are college towns, seats of government or home to a big company that nourishes others. Thanks to the Internet and to satellite technology, a company in Iowa City can be as connected as one in Los Angeles--minus the traffic jams.