This information was taken from the EDC website.
Sitting in his Seattle office and composing his list of best U.S. places to avoid a recession, Mark Hovind, president of JobBit.com, found something odd about Texas. While the rest of the country zigged economically, Texas zagged, he found. Hovind's research then led him to list Tyler as one of the most recession-proof cities not only in the state, but in the nation. In an article published earlier this month for Newgeography.com, he placed Tyler seventh nationally and second in Texas for its recession resistance. In Texas, it ranked behind only the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission area in terms of 12 months of positive job grown. "Tyler is doing very well," Hovind said in a telephone interview Thursday. Tom Mullins, Tyler Economic Development Council president and CEO, said medical, education, government and retail sectors of the area's economy have kept the nation's economic woes from gouging too deeply here.
After steady increases in the downed economy, unemployment in the Tyler area fell to 6.4 percent in April from the previous month's 6.6 percent. January posted the highest unemployment of the past decade at 6.8 percent. April 2007 saw the decade's lowest unemployment at 3.8 percent. Hovind said he learned, after extensive research, that education and health has kept Tyler out of economic hot water. "If it weren't for education and health, Tyler would be losing jobs," he said, adding that those sectors have added about 2,000 jobs since 1990. He said the city has grown "97 percent of the time" since 1990. "Tyler is growing, and it is still growing," Hovind said. "That's an amazing statistic. "You've been relatively recession proof for quite some time."