CNNMoney.com > Small Business > Best Places to Launch

Iowa
Rank Metro area Population # of small businesses
(1-49 employees)*
#18 among small places Ames 86,754 1,911
  Cedar Rapids 255,452 6,376
  Davenport 377,626 9,013
#8 among midsize places Des Moines 556,230 14,174
#8 among small places Dubuque 92,724 2,585
  Iowa City 149,437 3,559
  Sioux City 143,157 3,607
#17 among small places Waterloo 164,220 3,931
Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2007 County Business Patterns.
Best Places Winners
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Find your launch spot
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.