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Many foreclosures
These metro areas are struggling with high foreclosure rates.
Rank Metro area Foreclosure rate (1 per every X housing units) Population
1 Las Vegas, NV 13 1,865,746
2 Cape Coral, FL 14 593,136
3 Merced, CA 15 246,117
4 Riverside, CA 17 4,115,871
5 Stockton, CA 18 672,388
6 Modesto, CA 19 510,694
7 Madera, CA 20 148,333
8 Phoenix, AZ 22 4,281,899
9 Bakersfield, CA 22 800,458
10 Vallejo, CA 22 407,515
11 Orlando, FL 23 2,054,574
12 Yuba City, CA 24 165,274
13 Port St. Lucie, FL 25 403,768
14 Naples, FL 27 315,258
15 El Centro, CA 27 163,972
16 Miami, FL 28 5,414,772
17 Reno, NV 28 414,784
18 St. George, UT 28 137,589
19 Sacramento, CA 29 2,109,832
20 Punta Gorda, FL 30 150,060
21 Fresno, CA 32 909,153
22 Salinas, CA 32 408,238
23 Bend, OR 33 158,456
24 Visalia, CA 34 426,276
25 Lake Havasu City, AZ 34 196,281
Source: Housing data from RealtyTrac, for the first six months of 2009.
Best Places Winners
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Do you prefer a place that is: Small Medium Large
The factors that matter most to me are:
 Affordable wages  Few foreclosures
 Educated workers  Low housing costs
 Low crime  High local incomes
 A growing economy  Population growth
 Growing small business population

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How we picked the Best Places
This year we partnered with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to find the 50 most business-friendly communities in America.

With help from Robert Fairlie, an economist and leading scholar of entrepreneurship at the University of California, Santa Cruz, we developed a methodology and sifted through such data on factors such as per capita income, hourly wages, workforce quality, crime rates, taxes and foreclosures. More

Comments? E-mail the editors
Data partners

This package was produced in partnership with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

Foreclosure data provided by RealtyTrac.

Housing price-to-income data provided by Moody's Economy.com.