Birmingham-Hoover metro area is quiet economic engine for Alabama, business official tells Hoover chamber

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The Birmingham-Hoover metro area is the economic engine that drives the state of Alabama, but people don’t seem to realize that, a Birmingham Business Alliance official told the Hoover Area Chamber of Commerce today.

Many people have heard about economic activity in Huntsville and Mobile, but the seven-county Birmingham-Hoover area is responsible for 31 percent of the state’s gross domestic product, said Rick Davis, the Birmingham Business Alliance’s vice president for economic development.

The bulk of that is in Jefferson and Shelby counties, Davis told the 165 or so people at today’s luncheon.

In 2016, companies announced they were going to create 14,500 jobs and invest $5.1 billion in Alabama, Davis said, citing a state scorecard released Wednesday. The Birmingham-Hoover metro area accounted for about 20 percent of those jobs and 25 percent of the capital investment, he said.

Jefferson County alone was responsible for 1,436 of those announced jobs and $506 million in capital investment, Davis said. Jefferson County led the state in capital investment and was third in announced jobs, behind only Montgomery County and Madison County, he said.

“Money is coming in here. People are investing here,” Davis said.

The Birmingham-Hoover metro area, with close to 1.2 million people, is the 49th largest metro area in the country and has a gross domestic product of about $64 billion, Davis said.

The metro area has seen job growth for 69 consecutive months and is the only one of Alabama’s four largest metro areas that can say that, he said. The unemployment rate, while still too high, is one of the lowest in the state at 5.4 percent, second to only Huntsville, he said.

And 34 percent of the state’s retail transactions occur in the Birmingham-Hoover metro area, he said.

 “This economy here is a pretty big engine for growth,” Davis said. “You ought to be proud of what’s happening here. We are really doing some great things here. It’s just not occurring as fast as we’d like it to.”

When people think of technology companies, they frequently think of the Huntsville area because of the Marshall Space Flight Center and Redstone Arsenal, but the Birmingham-Hoover metro area has about 750 technology companies, compared to about 400 in Huntsville, Davis said.

“This is a technology center that nobody was talking about because they just didn’t know,” he said.

The Birmingham Business Alliance has hired a national company to help spread the word about the metro area’s successes nationally, Davis said. And as national media outlets report on what’s happening here, people who live here have started taking more pride in their hometown, he said.

“It changes how our own people look at ourselves,” he said.

Birmingham recently ranked seventh in the nation in percentage growth of millennials moving into the city, Davis added. The area has more than 520,000 jobs, which is just slightly below its highest employment level of 533,000 jobs in 2006, Davis said.

“We’re going to get there,” he said. “It’s steady and solid, and we’re growing every month. It’s just not fast enough.”