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Top large places
Rank Metro area Population # of small businesses
(1-49 employees)*
1 Oklahoma City, OK 1,206,142 31,139
2 Pittsburgh, PA 2,351,192 57,272
3 Raleigh, NC 1,088,765 27,659
4 Houston, TX 5,728,143 112,748
5 Hartford, CT 1,190,512 28,609
6 Washington, DC 5,358,130 134,245
7 Charlotte, NC 1,701,799 42,926
8 Austin, TX 1,652,602 37,296
9 New York City, NY 19,006,798 516,827
10 Baltimore, MD 2,667,117 64,481
*Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2007 County Business Patterns.
Best Places Winners
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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.