The Geography of America’s Industrial Renaissance

"We may be far from replacing the 3 million industrial jobs lost in the recession, but the economy has added over 330,000 industrial jobs since 2010, with output growing at the fastest pace since the 1990s," report Joel Kotkin and Michael Shires.

The recovery of the auto industry is supporting growth in the Great Lakes and the Mid-South and Southeast. The booming energy industry is driving rising employment in Houston, Oklahoma City, and elsewhere. And a diversity of thriving industrial sectors, from technology to petrochemicals, are driving growth in the South and West.

However, according to Kotkin and Shires, this manufacturing revival is not evident everywhere. Many of California's large metropolitan regions have “yet to participate in the nation’s industrial recovery,” the authors say. “Since 2010, manufacturing employment nationwide has grown more than 4% while in California industrial jobs have barely grown."