The Greensboro City Council gives a lot of lip service to being business friendly.
However, according to one national survey, lip service is all you get because Greensboro doesn’t do a good job of being business friendly compared to other cities in the state.
According to WalletHub.com, Durham is the best large city in North Carolina to start a business and the fifth best in the country.
Charlotte is the second best large city in the state to start a business and eighth best in the country.
Raleigh is not far behind as the third best city in the state and the 11th best in the country, followed closely by Winston-Salem as the 13th best in the country.
So, the list includes North Carolina’s largest city, Charlotte; second largest city, Raleigh; fourth largest city, Durham; and fifth largest city, Winston-Salem as all in the top 15 in the country.
Then you have Greensboro, currently the third largest city in the state, on the list as the worst large city in the state to start a business and the 48th best in the country.
According to the press release, WalletHub compared 19 metrics in three key dimensions – business environment, access to resources and business costs.
In the business environment category – which includes the average growth in number of small businesses, five-year business survival rate and job growth – Greensboro ranked 79th in the country while Charlotte ranked 11th and Durham 38th.
In the Access to Resources category Durham ranked 5th, Raleigh 8th and Greensboro 55th.
However, in the business costs category – which includes office space affordability, labor costs, corporate taxes and cost of living – Greensboro ranked second in the country behind only Winston-Salem. In that category, Durham ranked 21st in the country, Charlotte 32nd and Raleigh 31st.
While lists like this one by Wallethub make subjective judgments on how each of the metrics is weighted, there is some objective data that would support Durham being business friendly, and that is population growth.
From 2010 to 2020, Durham grew by 28.7 percent while Greensboro grew by 13.5 percent. According to the US Census Bureau, in 2022, Greensboro had a population of 298,263 and Durham was at 285,527.
I sure would like to hear what Mayor Vaughn thinks about these FACTS.
And yet we keep re-electing the same City and County leaders.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again….
Little Portland
Chicago Lite
3 CHEERS for our Democrats leading City Council AND Guilford County! Do ya’ll deserve a participation award???Gary
I care more about what O’Reilly’s, boom, Publix, Toyota, and the other Fortune 500 companies think. Told care less about Wallethub thinks they don’t bring jobs
While I agree that the idiots on the Greensboro city council and guilford county commissioners are anti business we also do not want to be anything like Durham, the cesspit of North Carolina .
Unfortunately it is about race with our city council and not about providing/ attracting new businesses into Greensboro. Only the airport is receiving new businesses. They are their own governing body and do not answer to this racist non- caring city council.
Stop lying!
You got what you voted for. Greensboro is the cesspit….with really high taxes and zero accountability…same with county commissioners.
Mandate Mayor will be remembered as the driving force in overspending and allowing our infrastructure and public safety to crumble all the while her donors and sycophants pad their accounts.
Seeing as there are less than 50 states and 5 cities in NC in the top 50…. This seems like a success story.
Hire more govt employees! Spend more extorted money to stimulate the local economy! When drunken sailors hit town Saturday, it’s hay for the merchants; then, they leave town.
So, if you actually read the report and look at the background information, Greensboro didn’t do that bad. However, here are some things that really hurt: no colleges or universities in the top 500 schools (the rest had at least 1), poor access to investors, loans and operating capital, high unemployment and lower skill levels compared to Wake, Durham and Mecklenburg. Maybe City Council should take our tax money and pay more skilled people to move to Greensboro, then start their own world-class university and offer free money to untested startups.