Houston Tops in U.S. Manufacturing Employment

Feb. 14, 2011
Texas city is home to more than 200,000 industrial jobs.

Houston may be the fourth-most populous city in the United States, but it ranks first when it comes to the number of manufacturing jobs within its city limits. That's the word from Manufacturers News Inc., a compiler and publisher of industrial directories, which generated the list as of year-end 2010.

The Texas city takes the top spot with 228,226 manufacturing jobs, nearly 90,000 more than the second-place finisher, New York, with 139,127 jobs. The data reflect only jobs within city limits and does not include either suburbs or exurbs.

Five of the top 50 cities are in California (Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, Irvine and Santa Clara), while four are located in Texas. Among notable changes cited by Manufacturers News since it last compiled the list in 2008: Detroit fell to 45th place from 29th, and Seattle moved up to 34th from 46th place. The publisher also noted that the top 10 cities lost a total of 95,805 manufacturing jobs, or 8.4%, since August 2008.

The top 10 industrial cities, including the number of manufacturing jobs, are:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Houston
New York
Chicago
Los Angeles
St. Louis
Dallas
Cincinnati
Indianapolis
Phoenix
San Diego
228,226
139,127
108,692
83,719
83,123
81,626
81,364
79,566
77,322
70,709
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About the Author

Jill Jusko

Bio: Jill Jusko is executive editor for IndustryWeek. She has been writing about manufacturing operations leadership for more than 20 years. Her coverage spotlights companies that are in pursuit of world-class results in quality, productivity, cost and other benchmarks by implementing the latest continuous improvement and lean/Six-Sigma strategies. Jill also coordinates IndustryWeek’s Best Plants Awards Program, which annually salutes the leading manufacturing facilities in North America. 

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