TAMPA -- Tampa Bay is getting bigger, but not any richer. The annual Regional Competitiveness Report says that while people keep moving here... we're still near the bottom of 20 comparable metro areas in education, and at the bottom for wages and participation in the labor force.
Tampa Bay Partnership President and CEO Rick Homans says that while we all love the Bay area, "We sometimes live in a bubble of false optimism." He hopes the data in the report will give us an "unvarnished and unfiltered view" of the region's progress and points out some issues that need to be addressed regionally.
Homans thinks you should take all those surveys that give our area high rankings, with a grain of salt. "That's a business, that's an industry producing those rankings, and getting communities to use them and to pat themselves on the back, we think in some cases, prematurely."
The Regional Competitiveness Report identified three factors that could help the region's performance: transit availability, STEM education and increasing the median household income.
Some of the data cited was collected pre-pandemic, and some of it post-pandemic, so it's difficult to make direct comparisons as to how COVID-19 has affected the Tampa Bay economy.
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