Brookings Releases Report on Mountain Mega Regions Including the Front Range

The Brookings Institution just released an outstanding and very comprehensive new report titled Mountain Megas: America's Newest Metropolitan Places and a Federal Partnership to Help Them Prosper. The report assesses the emergence of five megapolitan regions in the Intermountain West: the Sun Corridor, Front Range, Wasatch Front, Greater Las Vegas and Northern New Mexico. Each of these regions are also separately profiled. See below for links to these individual profiles.



Megapolitan Profiles:
Sun Corridor »
Front Range »
Wasatch Front »
Greater Las Vegas »
Northern New Mexico »



The report analyzes the demographic, economic and geographic factors which are driving the region's growth and analyzes the trends and forces impacting each of the Megapolitan areas in the region. It also provides many general policy suggestions for improving prosperity in the region.

The report is well worth reading fully but below are few tasty tidbits to whet your appetite.

• According to the report, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Las Vegas and Arizona are rapidly becoming the "New American Heartland as its economy, people, and politics become more central to the nation. Politically, the Intermountain West could be home to several swing states in the 2008 election and in time play the storied “kingmaking” role the Midwest does now."
  

• The report defines the Front Range as "Colorado’s I-25 corridor linking up metropolitan Boulder, Colorado Springs, Denver, Fort Collins, and Greeley."



• One of the factors which has held the mega-regions in the Intermountain West back from becoming "World Cities" is the absence of a deep network of international air routes connecting these regions with global destinations. The region, including the Front Range, also performs relatively poorly in measures of air freight shipments and exports per capita.
  


• The report identifies four asset types which play a key role in driving productivity: infrastructure, innovation, human capital and quality places.

• Colorado has three Universities that rank in the top 100 state research institutions: University of Colorado (26), University of Colorado, Denver Health Sciences Center (42) and Colorado State University (55).
  

• With 19% of its work force in critical knowledge industry clusters - financial services, IT, health care and knowledge creation - the Front Range has the highest percentage of any of the five Mountain Megas.

• Labor productivity and per capita income in the five Mountain Megas trail the national averages except in the Front Range which was substantially more productive and had higher income per capita than the other five regions and than the U. S. as a whole.

• 36% of Front Range Residents had Bachelor's degrees in 2006, more than any other Mountain Mega region and well above the national average.

• The federal government should increase its partnership with regional governing entities in the Mountain Megas to improve they key productivity enhancing assets listed above.