New Orleans has more to celebrate than Super Bowl XLVII

In his latest column, the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Andrew Ross highlights all that has been going right economically for the host city of Sunday’s Super Bowl. “New Orleans’ recent performance in job growth, economic output and rising home prices puts it at the top of the list of major metropolitan areas surveyed by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank,” Ross says, adding: “And that includes the Silicon Valley, which ranks second, and San Francisco, which comes in, shockingly, 23rd.” Meanwhile, Forbes magazine recently called Louisiana “America’s new frontier for business opportunity.” Ross calls the Forbes title “insult to injury,” and then lists other ways in which New Orleans has been besting the Bay Area off the football field. “Louisiana boasted $22.5 billion in new capital investment last year—not bad for a state with a population of 4.6 million, compared, say, with the nine-county Bay Area’s 7.1 million,” he writes. “Its publicly funded workforce-training programs have been judged the best in the country, and there are an increasing number of digital enterprises coming into New Orleans and the state.” Still, as Ross notes, there’s much work that still needs to be done in the Bayou State. “Louisiana continues to rank far lower in rankings that measure crime, health care, and other economic and non-economic factors,” he says. Read the full column here.