CNNMoney.com > Small Business > Best Places to Launch

Texas
Rank Metro area Population # of small businesses
(1-49 employees)*
#15 among small places Abilene 159,521 3,752
  Amarillo 243,838 5,759
#8 among large places Austin 1,652,602 37,296
  Beaumont 378,255 7,550
  Brownsville 392,736 6,158
  College Station 207,425 4,067
  Corpus Christi 415,376 9,207
  Dallas 6,300,006 131,317
#17 among midsize places El Paso 742,062 12,488
#4 among large places Houston 5,728,143 112,748
#7 among midsize places Killeen 378,935 5,574
  Laredo 236,941 4,643
  Longview 204,746 5,010
#12 among midsize places Lubbock 270,610 6,571
#16 among midsize places McAllen 726,604 10,028
#6 among small places Midland 129,494 4,151
  Odessa 131,941 3,101
  San Angelo 109,563 2,559
  San Antonio 2,031,445 38,084
  Sherman 118,804 2,558
  Texarkana 135,509 2,881
  Tyler 201,277 5,153
  Victoria 114,313 2,714
  Waco 230,213 4,733
  Wichita Falls 147,328 3,426
Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2007 County Business Patterns.
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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.