Why we're still #5 - and Phoenix isn't

The official 2010 Census returns are now in for Philadelphia, and they contain news everyone expected and a surprise few did. The expected news was that the city's five-decade-plus slide in population finally came to a halt: there are 8,456 more Philadelphians than there were ten years ago, an 0.56% increase. (Yes, it's small, but hey, we'll take it - a gain is a gain.)

The unexpected news is that we are not, as the Philadelphia Daily News article reporting the gain said we would be, staring up at Phoenix. To the surprise of Philly boosters, we remain the fifth largest city in the country, as the actual census count showed Phoenix with only half the population gain the Census Bureau had estimated in the previous year.

The news gives our municipal ego a huge boost, for there is a big difference between being in the top five U.S. cities and sitting just below those five, psychologically speaking. But it does raise an interesting question, given that Census estimates are usually not so far off: Why were they? How did we end the decade still bigger than Phoenix?

I would like to suggest it's because we still have a real, diverse economy and they don't.

Some years ago, I would regularly read a magazine published in Phoenix for that city's gay and lesbian community but distributed well beyond it. (To get people to move there, is my guess why.)

I couldn't help but notice that just about every ad in the magazine was from someone selling real estate.

Now, this periodical and those ads may have offered a skewed view of what makes Phoenix tick, but I suspect not. And there's nothing wrong with selling real estate; lots of folks do that around here too.

But if selling real estate is just about the only economic activity anyone engages in, then you have a problem. Not only is basing an entire economy on the sale of real estate something akin to basing it on taking in one another's laundry, but when the market goes kablooey, so does the whole local economy.

In case anyone forgot, the real estate market went kablooey in 2009 and has yet to truly recover, especially in those areas where everyone was trying to cash in on real estate. Areas like metropolitan Phoenix, to name one.

Were other things going on in Phoenix, that city might indeed have passed us in population. But what else is going on there? Here, we manufacture drugs. We write software. We refine crude oil. We make cakes, cookies and crackers. We still even make clothes and build ships. And we educate scores of thousands of college students. Do they do any of this in Phoenix? (Well, there is a university in Phoenix. But you don't have to go there to attend it; in fact, it probably has a campus in an office park near you.)

Put bluntly, people move to Phoenix because it has lots of sunshine and no cold weather, while people move here because we have opportunity. There, you can find a nice house; here, you can find a nice job. There, the boom ended in a bust; here, the bust didn't matter all that much. Our resilient and diverse economy, and the jobs it generates, is what kept us one step ahead of Phoenix.

By Sandy Smith

Sandy Smith is a veteran freelance writer, editor and public relations professional who lives in Philadelphia. Besides blogging for PhillyJobs.com, he has written for numerous publications and websites, would be happy to do your resume, and is himself actively seeking career opportunities on Beyond.com. Check out his LinkedIn profile and read his other posts on PhillyJobsBlog.com.